With a whole host of Universal horror efforts on the way over the next few years, there’s now an update on the new incarnation of Bride of Frankenstein.

While we’d previously heard that the film was loosely booked in for a 2019 release date, director Bill Condon has confirmed that shooting is due to start early next year. Speaking to Forbes, Condon revealed, “I’ve got the same team together that made Beauty and the Beast and we’re building big sets and designing big set pieces, so it’s a pretty big movie. We start on February 1st, 2018 so it’s the early days but just to be here in London, starting to see locations and to talk about sets that we’re building, it’s very exciting.”

Condon continued, “For me, the Hames Whale movie is really right there in the pantheon for me. As you know, the Bride is a character who appears in the last five minutes and then is destroyed, so it’s a way to almost continue the movie that you imagine the movie he might have made the third Frankenstein movie but in 2018.”

Last year’s Tom Cruise-headlined The Mummy was ultimately a disappointment, and it threw up suggestions that Universal may completely scrap their Dark Universe of shared monster movies already. Seemingly not, though.

As well as Bride of Frankenstein, the last we’d heard was that Universal had Johnny Depp signed up to star in The Invisible Man, Javier Bardem to play the monster in Frankenstein, and then Dwayne Johnson was being eyed to star in The Wolfman. Where Bride is concerned, the studio have been regularly pursuing Angelina Jolie to take the titular role, although nothing official has been announced on that front.

Currently, Bride of Frankenstein is set for a February 14th, 2019 release.