Sony Pictures is developing a contemporary adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein based on a pitch by Craig Fernandez.  Fernandez will write the script while Matt Tolmach will produce through his new company, Matt Tolmach Productions.  According to Deadline, this will be Tolmach's first production at Sony since leaving his post as the company's co-president to become a producer.  Fernandez' previous credits include the upcoming From Prada to Nada and he's also written the scripts Everything Must Go (based on Terry Pratchett's The Bromeliad Trilogy) and an adaptation of Octavia Butler novel Clay's Ark for DreamWorks Animation.  He's also written The Courageous, which is a futuristic adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's Captain Courageous.

If you've never read Frankenstein, you should because it's awesome.  It's also in the public domain, which means it's free.  Hit the jump for the synopsis.

Here's the synopsis for Frankenstein [via Amazon]:

"I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion." A summer evening's ghost stories, lonely insomnia in a moonlit Alpine's room, and a runaway imagination--fired by philosophical discussions with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley about science, galvanism, and the origins of life--conspired to produce for Marry Shelley this haunting night specter. By morning, it had become the germ of her Romantic masterpiece, Frankenstein. Written in 1816 when she was only nineteen, Mary Shelley's novel of "The Modern Prometheus" chillingly dramatized the dangerous potential of life begotten upon a laboratory table. A frightening creation myth for our own time, Frankenstein remains one of the greatest horror stories ever written and is an undisputed classic of its kind.

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