I found a grainy 16mm reel of Ishirō Honda’s The Human Vapor while chasing a different story, and the room got quiet the way a theater does when the lights dip. The footage felt like a time capsule uncorked, the kind of discovery that forces a decision: polish it for streaming or let its grime be part of the point. I want to walk you through what Netflix’s modern take means for the film’s skin, and why Panos Cosmatos shooting an ’80s vampire thriller matters to anyone who follows genre cinema.
Ally
The newsroom pinged with a Variety alert: Bong Joon Ho’s first animated feature, Ally, has assembled an English cast that reads like a mixtape of indie and blockbuster names. You’ll see Ayo Edebiri, Bradley Cooper, Dave Bautista, and Werner Herzog attached—names that suggest Bong’s ocean-floor fable will be as strange as it is starry.
I mention this because Netflix’s move on Honda’s work sits in the same conversation: who gets to retell a genre film, and how much star power changes the shape of an idea when it moves from celluloid to streaming products like Netflix or theatrical partners like A24?
The Human Vapor
At a midnight screening I attended last year, people whispered the moment the creature appeared—nervous, delighted, and a little unsure what to expect next. Netflix has released a trailer for an eight-episode modernization of Ishirō Honda’s 1960 monster/crime film The Human Vapor, and the noise around it matters because Honda’s original lives in a space between sci-fi slickness and noir grit.
I want you to picture how Netflix approaches genre: larger episode counts, mood-driven cinematography, and a willingness to reframe older narratives for contemporary politics and technology. The trailer recasts the vapor-man’s oddball logic into a serialized mystery, which raises specific creative and ethical questions about adaptation.
When will Netflix’s The Human Vapor premiere?
Netflix has not announced an official release date. The surprise trailer functions as an early market signal—expect marketing to ramp closer to a festival slot or a platform rollout later this year or early next year.
How faithful will the series be to Ishirō Honda’s original film?
Faithful is a spectrum. Honda’s version blends creature effects and crime melodrama; the series appears to expand the crime-thread and modernize the social stakes. That often means more character work, extended plot arcs, and visual updates that reference both Honda and contemporary thrillers on Netflix.
Who’s involved in Netflix’s modernization?
Netflix is the platform; creative teams and casting remain mostly under wraps beyond the trailer. I’m watching for collaborators with track records in neo-noir or modern monster work—people who can translate Honda’s practical-effects sensibility into a serialized grammar without losing the original’s moral itch.
For context, think about how directors like Guillermo del Toro have argued for material consistency in adaptations: when creatures share the same “material” as human actors, the film’s tone stays coherent. Del Toro has publicly described how stop-motion and puppetry shift audience perception, a debate that will echo in any conversation about modernizing Honda.
Flesh of the Gods
On a backlot in Toronto there’s a scaffold framed against an artificial sunset: a luxury high-rise set that will stand in for 1980s L.A. production on Panos Cosmatos’s new film has officially begun. Deadline confirms that A24’s Flesh of the Gods is in production with Kristen Stewart, Wagner Moura, Esmé Creed-Miles, Roland Møller, and Alba Baptista attached—an intoxicating cast for a vampire thriller set amid neon nightlife and skyscraper glass.
Cosmatos is building what feels like a neon cathedral of hedonism: he’s always trafficked in images that blur glamour and decay, and this project looks like more of the same in the best possible way. If you follow indie genre cinema—people like those at A24 or festival programmers at Cannes—you know this combination of cast and director is built to attract critics and cult audiences at once.
Production has started; that matters because timing changes festival strategies, distribution conversations, and potential release windows. I’ll be watching how the film is positioned—festival premiere versus platform strategy will tell us if A24 intends to push it into awards season or into a cult circuit.
The Buried Giant
Inside a stop-motion shop you can hear wooden armatures creak and the steady click of animators’ teeth as they count frames. Guillermo del Toro told Deadline that his adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant will be a “fascinatingly difficult” stop-motion project made “without any concession to a family audience.”
Del Toro’s point is practical: mixing live-action humans with stop-motion creatures can rupture a film’s internal logic. He wants the entire world to feel of one material, which means years of painstaking production. That honesty about craft signals a patience not all adapters possess, and it raises the bar for Netflix and studios that plan to modernize classic genre titles.
Other quick signals
I watched the new trailer for Rick and Morty season nine and laughed at the robotic furniture chase; it’s a reminder that established franchises can still deliver jolts of invention if they keep risk in the frame. Meanwhile, the festival circuit is lighting up with titles like Sanguine—a virus thriller screening at Cannes Midnight Screenings—and smaller studios are releasing trailers that will compete for attention on social platforms and streamer homepages.
These items matter to you not as isolated press hits but as a pattern: platforms, festivals, and indie labels are redefining how genre travels from idea to screen.
If Netflix modernizes Honda’s vapor-man for eight episodes while Cosmatos builds his ’80s vampire cathedral, which film will change how we think about remaking classics—faithful retelling, bold reinterpretation, or something in between?
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
Get your adrenaline pumping with Marion Le Corroller’s first feature SPECIES (SANGUINE), screening at the #Cannes2026 Midnight Screenings. pic.twitter.com/7HRV0kQW9t
— WTFilms (@What_The_Films) May 12, 2026