Netflix's Dark Hunchback, Soul of Paris Sends Readers to Hugo

Netflix released the first trailer on 30 October 2026 for The Hunchback, Soul of Paris, a French live-action adaptation directed by Jean-François Richet, First Showing reported.

The film premieres globally on Netflix on 27 November 2026, and Vincent Cassel stars as the hunchback, according to What's on Netflix.

The film reframes Hugo's novel as a historical thriller set against Paris's 1830 cholera outbreak, as Frenchly describes. Netflix's own listing sets up the premise: a hunchback hunted for medical experiments is caught between political turmoil and impossible love, as the streamer's title page puts it.

Frenchly also reports that the story draws on a theory, based on findings by British archivist Adrian Glew, that Hugo's hunchback was inspired by a real hunchbacked stonemason working in Paris. Richet has cited that theory as an inspiration.

The trailer opens with a hooded prisoner in a jail cell and a voice that seems to belong to Hugo himself, saying he wanted to write a great novel for the people, per ScreenRealm.

Anyone coming to the film from the Disney cartoon or the classic Hollywood versions may be surprised by the original. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame was published in 1831 as Notre-Dame de Paris and is set in 15th-century Paris, as Britannica notes, centring on the cathedral itself.

Wikipedia's entry records that Hugo conceived the book partly as a plea for preserving Gothic architecture. It adds that he was reportedly unhappy that the 1833 English title focused on a single character.

That makes Richet's choice of a nineteenth-century plague setting a notable departure. It moves the story from Hugo's medieval Paris to the Paris of Hugo's own day, the year before the novel appeared.

Want the full verdict? Hugo's novel is richer and more architecturally digressive than most screen versions suggest, and our review of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame covers whether it rewards a first read.