Vincent Cassel is playing Quasimodo, and the Quasimodo he is playing may have been a real man. Netflix has put out five first-look images from The Hunchback, Soul of Paris and set a worldwide release for November 27, 2026.
Jean-François Richet directs from a script by Éric Besnard and Edgar Marie. Around Cassel are Karim Leklou, Benjamin Voisin and Daphné Patakia, plus Noémie Lvovsky, Sébastien Pouderoux, Eli Nachmani and Alexis Rosenstiehl. Per Bloody Disgusting, Leklou is the security chief hunting Quasimodo and Voisin a doctor who wants him on a table; Netflix has not published character names.
There Was a Real Hunchback at Notre-Dame
Netflix describes the film in its own logline as a reimagining of the life of “the man said to have inspired” Hugo’s character, which is a strange thing for an adaptation to hang its whole pitch on until you know the paper trail. In 2010, Tate archivist Adrian Glew worked through the memoirs of Henry Sibson, a British sculptor hired in the 1820s to help repair Notre-Dame after the Revolution wrecked it. Sibson wrote about a government carver the other workers called le bossu: “he was humpbacked and he did not like to mix with carvers.” Hugo lived in the same quarter of Paris at the same time and published his novel in 1831.
Cholera, Not Curses
The official synopsis sets the film on the eve of the July Revolution in 1830, with cholera spreading through the city and Quasimodo caught between the political violence and an impossible love. That is roughly 350 years forward from Hugo, who put the novel in 1482. Richet has described the film as being about class struggle, the people, the elites, medicine, beauty and “the beauty of the ugly.” A hunted disfigured man, a doctor who wants to open him up, and a city dying of a waterborne disease is a gothic setup with or without a bell tower.
Richet and Cassel, Round Three
They made Mesrine together in 2008, the two-part crime epic that won Cassel the César for Best Actor, and The Emperor of Paris in 2018 with Cassel as Vidocq. Richet also directed the 2005 Assault on Precinct 13 remake and Blood Father. Radar Films produced this one at around €30 million, which puts it among the most expensive French-language films Netflix has bankrolled.
Shooting ran from August to October last year in Paris, Compiègne and Senlis, with Saint-Étienne de Bourges Cathedral standing in for Notre-Dame. The cathedral Hugo wrote his novel to help save is still being put back together after the 2019 fire, so the film about it had to go find another church. It arrives on Netflix in November.
