Ingenuity and creative brilliance form the foundation of the entertainment industry. It’s not always about building something new upon that foundation, but about reforming, reshaping, re-crafting, and innovating something that, though familiar, is an utterly new exploration with illimitable promise. This is the case with “Hyde,” a new venture to enter the entertainment sphere under the collaborative efforts of Johnny Depp, Ridley Scott, and Mechanical Cake.

Explored Terrain Gives Way to Innovative Discovery

Hyde is a most recognizable intellectual property born through the imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson’s work was a thriller, a dive into the dark psychology of humanity, the nexus of good and evil in one single person, that of Dr. Jekyll, who was somewhat of a scientist but very much an explorer, driven by a penchant to separate his darker side from that of the light. He sought a way to control his alter ego, Hyde. When the monster was unleashed, it was uncontrollable. It was a horrifying look at the parts of ourselves that we can’t always control or contain. It was a tale that inspired adaptations in film. 

A New Direction

Enter the flipped narrative. When one thinks of adaptations or reworks, they think of the same material simply being remodeled, likely with subtler changes, perhaps in character or maybe even time. The flipped narrative is often a more innovative approach to building off a former concept. It is a much more creative idea to suppose that an original work might have been written with a different stroke of insight. This idea suggests considering how events might unfold if the narrative were flipped, as exemplified by Hyde. According to a press release, “Created by Jesse Negron, Hyde picks up Mr. Hyde’s story from the Robert Louis Stevenson novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and imagines a world where Mr. Hyde has defeated Jekyll.