Universal Pictures is exhuming their classic monster mash legacy for a shared movie universe in the 21st century!
For years, Marvel fans have been gloating in their lone, successful shared movie universe. However…Marvel Studios was not the first. And like a Transylvanian corpse, that progenitor of the shared movie universe is not dead—it’s just waiting to be awakened with fresh blood once more.
And that is exactly what Universal Pictures is aiming to do with its iconic horror movie legacy that dates back to 1931 with the double whammy release of Tod Browning’s Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi, and James Whale’s Frankenstein, starring g Boris Karloff. This universe (arguably) lasted until the 1954 production of The Creature of the Black Lagoon, but certainly lumbered on until House of Dracula (1945), the third consecutive monster mash movie to feature Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolf Man, and/or Dracula in the same picture. It happened one more time as well in 1946’s spoof, Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
Now, as reported in Deadline, Universal has tapped Alex Kurtzman and Chris Morgan to exhume these hallow grounds of unholy monsters with the aim of bringing back this shared monster mash to the 21st century.
Universal has previously resurrected this legacy in the past, including in the hammy and deathly dull 1979 Dracula starring Frank Langella, as well as in the amusing The Mummy remake circa 1999, which starred Brendan Fraser, and the less enjoyable sequel and abominable Van Helsing (2004). Universal also toyed with a similar idea in 2010 with The Wolfman, which is a beautiful looking picture, but with a ridiculous budget for the genre (potentially exceeding $100 million) and a weak script, failed to ignite into anything more.
However, this is the first time that Universal has hired two producers to organize a top-down multi-film approach as successfully pioneered by Marvel Studios. Kurtzman, who co-wrote Star Trek, Transformers, and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 with Roberto Orci, will partner with Morgan to introduce that cohesion. Reportedly, it is expected to begin with 2016’s The Mummy reboot. However, in the immediate future, Universal is releasing Dracula Untold with Luke Evans in the lead. If that movie is a success, it is hard to not imagine Evans could become the Undead Count for this shared universe as well.
It’s safe to say that it’s alive.
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