The Castagnetti adaptation lands in October, built on a deliberate gamble: that Leroux’s 1910 obsession narrative reads better as a contemporary romance than it does as gothic horror. The decision to retarget the story toward young adult audiences — explicitly borrowing the emotional architecture of Stephenie Meyer — signals something worth watching, if only because the film’s own production team knows exactly what it’s doing. This is not apology-era prestige cinema pretending its source material needs saving. This is a French production with 20 million euros on the table, aware that it’s folding a 114-year-old serial installment into a genre that dominates global box office, and proceeding anyway.
Gaston Leroux originally published Le Fantôme de l’Opéra across five months in Le Gaulois, the Paris newspaper, before Pierre Lafitte collected it as a novel in March 1910. The serialization matters: Leroux structured the work as episodic shocks and investigative revelation, a feuilleton convention that kept readers cliffhanging between editions. The narrator is a working journalist, piecing together the “truth” of the Opera Ghost from interviews, backstage rumor, and the testimony of people who survived Erik’s orbit. This multi-modal narration — Leroux switches between first-person testimony, third-person narration, and direct dialogue — gives the novel a deceptive realism. The Phantom exists, yes, but he is a man, a point Leroux hammers from the opening. The horror sits not in the supernatural but in the sustained cruelty of a genius who has been treated as a monster all his life and has become one in response.
The central preoccupation is the gap between surfaces and what they conceal. The Opéra Garnier, all gilt and theatrical illusion, sits above a labyrinth of cellars and underground lakes. Erik — disfigured, musically gifted, utterly alone — has carved out an existence in that darkness. Christine Daaé, the young soprano, believes an “Angel of Music” has been tutoring her voice; she doesn’t know for years that Erik is the man teaching her, and that his instruction is also abduction, a slow collapse of her agency into his possession. Leroux refuses to make this simple. Erik is not a villain. He is a man for whom human connection has always meant rejection, and his love for Christine is inseparable from his need to control the only person who has ever chosen to listen to him.
Scholars have compared the novel to Beauty and the Beast and Frankenstein — both narratives about the consequences of rejecting the unusual-looking, both featuring protagonists whose violence is rooted in years of dehumanization. What separates Leroux from, say, Mary Shelley is tone. Leroux had worked as a court reporter and theater critic before turning to fiction. He knew Paris, the opera house, the rhythm of how power and gender move through enclosed spaces. The novel breathes with that journalism: gossip, specificity, institutional detail.
What Alexandre Castagnetti Is Building
The director’s seventh feature film — after Tamara, Stand by Love, and several projects working with young actors in contemporary Paris settings — casts the story not in Leroux’s 1880s but in present-day Paris. Anastasia, played by 18-year-old Deva Cassel (recently of Netflix’s The Leopard, and daughter of actor Vincent Cassel), arrives at the Opéra Garnier as a ballet dancer full of hope. James Figueras, the ambitious artistic director, has announced a season centered on Orpheus — a new opera composed by Ernest Dupré, a mysterious, reclusive figure known only as the Phantom of the Opera. As Anastasia rehearses, she meets the pianist. He’s brilliant, hidden, intensely focused. She falls.
The casting alone says something. Julien De Saint Jean, who co-starred in Pierre Niney’s The Count of Monte Cristo (2024), carries a different register than Joel Schumacher’s Gerard Butler — less masculine archetype, more artistic vulnerability. Romain Duris, who spent the 2020s in prestige European cinema (The Animal Kingdom, Eiffel, The Three Musketeers), plays Figueras as an institution man, a person inside the power structure, which complicates his eventual encounter with the Phantom’s emotional claim.
The screenplay is co-written by Castagnetti and Camille Fontaine, who earned a César nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for Coco Before Chanel (2009). Fontaine’s track record is period accuracy and intimate character work. Her involvement signals that the script is not just transplanting Leroux but actually adapting him — finding the emotional truth and relocating it. The question, always, is whether a story rooted in 1880s hierarchies and 1910s serial melodrama survives being moved into a world where an 18-year-old dancer can walk away, where institutional power operates differently, where the Phantom has no leverage except the music itself.
The Craft
Nicolas Bolduc, the cinematographer, shot The Count of Monte Cristo (2024) and The Three Musketeers (2023), both of which relied on opulence — heavily art-directed interiors, faces lit with careful drama, a camera that loves surfaces while suggesting rot beneath. The Opéra Garnier doesn’t need much help looking like a stage. Bolduc’s job is to find what’s theatrical and what’s true in the same frame.
Marion Motin choreographed. This matters, perhaps more than anything else. Motin trained in classical ballet and hip-hop, and she has choreographed for Stromae, Angèle, Madonna’s MDNA Tour, and — most recently and most tellingly — Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024), which is a film about bodies, transformation, and male gaze. For that film, Motin didn’t stage traditional sequences. She created movement that was electric, contemporary, embodied-but-abstract. If she applies that sensibility to Phantom — if the opera and ballet sequences feel neither purely classical nor purely contemporary but something fractal between them — the production could find a visual language its predecessors haven’t. The De Palma film (1989) tried gothic camp. Joel Schumacher went kitsch. Castagnetti might be aiming for something closer to kinetic realism: real bodies moving through a real space, emotionally heightened.
Dan Levy composes the score. He’s the member of indie-pop band the Dø who won an Annie Award for his work on I Lost My Body (2019), the animated film about a hand crawling through Paris searching for the arm from which it was severed. Levy’s score for that film used minimalist electronic figures — a repeating, ascending synth motif — layered over orchestral strings and ambient sound. The strategy was to make emotional loss feel contemporary, not nostalgic. For Phantom, he faces the opposite problem: how to write music for a story centered on music (an opera called Orpheus, a Phantom who is a composer) without the score consuming the narrative. Levy has shown he can build emotional architecture from constraint. The orchestration — and whether he fragments or centers it — will determine whether Phantom feels like classical reanimation or something genuinely new.
The Adaptation Problem
Leroux’s novel is explicitly about invisibility and obsession. Christine doesn’t know Erik is the Angel of Music, and when she discovers him, she’s horrified but also — Leroux is careful here — complicit in his fantasy. She enters his subterranean home. She wears his ring. She is complicit because she has been groomed to be, and Leroux doesn’t let readers off the moral hook of that. The book ends with Christine choosing Raoul, her childhood sweetheart, and Erik dying in the cellars, having asked only that he be allowed to die unnamed and forgotten. It’s a gut-punch ending.
Moving to contemporary Paris means moving away from the opera house as a space of absolute institutional control, away from the idea that an engineer and a stage director might not know something is happening in their building, away from early 20th-century femininity as a passive vessel. Castagnetti has to reckon with 2026 awareness: Anastasia isn’t Christine. She speaks differently, moves differently, has a different relationship to danger and desire. The Orpheus opera-within-the-film becomes more metaphorical. A cursed opera is less plausible in contemporary Paris unless it’s being treated as meta-commentary, as theatrical performance of myth rather than a thing with literal supernatural weight.
The budget suggests the production is taking this seriously: 20 million euros for a French-language romantic drama centered on dance and music is not small change in 2026 cinema. The film wrapped September 26, 2025, after a July 28 start date, meaning principal photography fit neatly into nine weeks — the standard for European co-productions at this scale. The production was handled by SND (the French broadcaster M6’s production and distribution arm) and FullDawa Films, with SND handling French distribution.
The original release was September 23, 2026. The film was later shifted to October 28 — repositioned into the Halloween window, which is a statement about tone. September 23 reads as back-to-school prestige. October 28 reads as spooky season, but also as a strategic move away from Ariana Grande’s Wicked and Joker: Folie à Deux and into a zone where a romantic, supernatural-adjacent adult drama might breathe.
What’s Actually at Stake
If Castagnetti pulls this off — if Marion Motin’s choreography and Dan Levy’s orchestration conspire to make contemporary ballet and electronic-orchestral fusion feel like a single thought — then he will have done something most Phantom adaptations dodge: he will have made Leroux’s actual thesis legible. The novel is about how genius and cruelty become indistinguishable when a person has been taught they are disposable. It’s about how love transforms into control when the lover has never been allowed to believe they deserve reciprocal care. It’s about a young woman caught in that machinery, trying to survive.
In 2026 Paris, with a choreographer who understands bodies as sites of negotiation, and a composer trained to find emotion in constraint, that story might feel less melodramatic and more urgent than it has any right to be. Or it might feel like a very expensive Twilight fan fiction, and that would be its own problem — not necessarily a fatal one, given how much global box office gravitates toward that territory, but worth noting.
The production itself was already generating buyer interest at film markets by September 2025, months before principal photography wrapped. International distributors had begun pre-sales conversations. That level of early confidence suggests the team moved fast and clean: they knew what the film was, they knew who made it, and they built accordingly.
The Weight of Adaptation
Leroux’s novel has been adapted so many times — Rupert Julian’s 1925 silent film, Dario Argento’s 1989 Opera, Joel Schumacher’s 1989 Phantom of the Opera, and most consequentially Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1986 musical, which has defined the work for several generations of audiences — that anything new must position itself very precisely against what has already calcified in cultural memory. Lloyd Webber’s Phantom is a romantic tragedy, a man whose genius and loneliness make him sympathetic. That framing has won, almost completely. Schumacher’s film tried to follow Webber’s template, cranking the spectacle and the melodrama, and produced something closer to high opera than intimate drama.
Castagnetti has positioned himself against both of those. He’s not trying to out-spectacle the musical or out-melodrama Schumacher. He’s saying: what if we trust the young actors, trust dance as a primary language, trust contemporary music production to carry emotional weight that baroque spectacle can’t? It’s a directorial point of view, and it’s defensible. Whether it works is a different question entirely.
The film is not, to be clear, a sure thing. Young-adult positioning in European arthouse cinema has a mixed record. Casting relatively unknown leads (Deva Cassel’s profile is rising but not yet global, Julien De Saint Jean is a character actor, not a star) means the film lives or dies on whether audiences connect to Anastasia and Ernest in their first scenes together. The Opéra Garnier is a real location, which is beautiful and also logistically complex. Marion Motin’s choreography could be revelatory or it could feel wedged into a narrative that doesn’t want it there.
But the production has announced itself as something that cares about its source material and its own formal choices. It’s not trying to update Leroux for Instagram. It’s trying to move him into a different key, different setting, different emotional register — which is what an adaptation has to do to stay alive instead of becoming a museum piece.
The October 28 release is something to watch, if only for what it says about whether contemporary European cinema has appetite for romantic drama that refuses easy sentiment.
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