Donna Langley, a co-chairperson at Universal Pictures, opens up about the studio's action movie modernization plans for Universal Monsters.
For the last several months, fans have enjoyed a steady trickling of information about the future of the first shared Universal Monsters movie universe since 1948. It was only in September that Universal announced it was exhuming this legacy, and that they were hiring Alex Kurtzman and Chris Morgan to oversee the Universal Monsters cinematic universe.
Now, after much speculation, we have a more concrete view about what direction these movies will take. While speaking at a movie executive roundtable with The Hollywood Reporter, Donna Langley, a co-chairperson at Universal Pictures, opened up about why the studio is turning back to their legacy of classic horror movies—as well as what they may have possibly learned from unsuccessful attempts at dabbling in traditional remakes, such as 2010’s The Wolfman.
“We don’t have any capes [in our film library],” Langley said on the subject of superhero movies. “But what we do have is an incredible legacy and history with the monster characters. We’ve tried over the years to make monster movies – unsuccessfully, actually. So, we took a good, hard look at it and we settled upon an idea, which is to take it out of the horror genre, put it more in the action-adventure genre, and make it present day—bringing these incredibly rich and complex characters into present day and reimagine them, and reintroduce them to a contemporary audience.”
It would seem that the approach first teased by Roberto Orci, back when he initially was working with Kurtzman on The Mummy reboot, is coming to fruition with a focus on turning the monsters into action icons, instead of those of horror.
However, it raises a curious question about whether we will now ever see Guillermo del Toro’s vision for Frankenstein on the big screen. I asked him at San Diego Comic-Con this past July whether he would entertain the idea of doing the classic Mary Shelley story, as he has always flirted with at Universal, in the present day. Del Toro gave a rather emphatic answer.
“No, completely period,” del Toro told me. “I don’t think the monsters gain anything by being arbitrarily taken away from their literary roots. I love the idea of doing Frankenstein as a period piece.”
It seems that opportunity is likely not to come in the current approach at Universal, which includes, in addition to Kurtzman’s directorial debut in 2016’s The Mummy, a new The Wolfman remake being scripted by Prisoners’ Aaron Guzikowski, and an untitled (but believed to be Van Helsing reboot) project being penned by Fargo’s Noah Hawley.
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