Guillermo del Toro is one of the true visionaries working today. His love of elaborate production design, monsters, creatures, mayhem, and twisted tales is so consistent and distinguished that it's hard to mistake his work for someone else's. Or, put another way, nobody else makes movies quite like Guillermo del Toro does. His latest project is the gothic, romantic, haunting love story Crimson Peak, starring Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston, Mia Wasikowska, and Charlie Hunnam. It hits theaters on October 16, 2015.

Guillermo del Toro
Age: 50
Born: Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico
Best Known For: Pan’s Labyrinth, Blade II, Hellboy, Pacific Rim

First Feature Film:

Cronos (1993) signaled Guillermo del Toro as one of the must-watch up and coming directors. He was only in his late 20s when he made it, and while it wasn’t a huge box office success (it was also only released in a grand total of 28 theaters), its highly specific take on vampire mythology is still unique to this day.

Fun fact: Cronos was Mexico’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1993. 13 years later, Pan's Labyrinth would receive the same honor.

His Hollywood Breakout:

Mimic (1997), the creature feature about genetically engineered insects, is what really put Guillermo del Toro on the Hollywood map, but its lackluster box office performance ($25 million total off of a $30 million budget) didn’t exactly launch him onto the A-list. Mimic did eventually become a bit of a hit, spawning three sequels, but the movie that really kicked Guillermo del Toro’s career up a few notches was 2002’s Blade II. It was widely considered a very worthy follow-up to the original Blade and also wound up being a big hit around the world, earning three times its budget in theaters.

Big Budgets for Strange Monster Movies:

After Blade II took off with critics and audiences alike, Guillermo del Toro was able to earn enough clout to continue his fascination with monsters, only with much bigger budgets to power it all. Hellboy and its sequel Hellboy II: The Golden Army are two of the stranger comic book movies to ever get made for a mainstream market, but del Toro proved that if you have enough genuine enthusiasm for the material you can easily win with underdog material.

But for as strange and wonderful as the Hellboy movies are, their existence isn’t perhaps quite as miraculous as Pacific Rim’s. It’s not all that common for Hollywood to spend its biggest budgets on movies that don’t have existing fanbases, and yet somehow del Toro was able to get the greenlight for his nearly $200 million movie about giant robots fighting giant monsters.

His Spanish-Language Movies:

Guillermo del Toro is well known for his high profile Hollywood movies, but he is just as beloved by fans for his intimate Spanish-language movies. The vampire spin Cronos and the twisted fantasy of Pan's Labyrinth are his best known small movies, but perhaps the one closest in spirit to Crimson Peak is the often overlooked The Devil's Backbone, about a young boy who is sent to a haunted orphanage after the death of his father.

Trivia

Guillermo del Toro is a producer and director on the hit FX horror series The Strain, but did you know that he also co-wrote the book trilogy that it’s based on? And speaking of producing, del Toro has also been a key figure in making the movies Splice, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, Mama, Julia's Eyes, and While She Was Out. 

Guillermo del Toro was the original director of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, but eventually dropped out. Peter Jackson ended up directing the films, but del Toro retained a screenplay credit on all three movies. And they would be only one of many projects that del Toro has been involved with over the years that he never actually ended up making. He is notorious for being attached to projects that never happen, and that always growing list includes:

- At the Mountains of Madness
- Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
- Frankestein
- The Witches
- Salughterhouse-Five
- The Haunted Mansion
- Justice League Dark
- The Secret Garden

And speaking of more movies del Toro could have made, but didn't, he reportedly passed on the opportunities to direct Alien vs. Predator, Blade: Trinity, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban because they would have meant he couldn't direct Hellboy. A few years later, directing Hellboy II would keep him from directing I Am Legend, Halo, and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.