So this is kind of sad for horror movie buffs. Growing up for many fans Universal’s classic monster movies like Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Creature of the Black Lagoon, and others were a gateway to the genre and were landmarks in the early days of horror.
Now in a move to cash in on the success of Marvel’s shared universe concept, Universal Studios is working on their own shared cinematic universe with their classic monsters. This news has been known for some time and the recent Dracula Untold was supposedly the first of new franchise and will be followed by a Mummy reboot in 2016 with Alex Kurtzman directing and another unknown film (which will likely be a Wolf Man reboot) in 2017.
The new development from The Hollywood Reporter’s roundtable interview with six executive producers, including Universal’s Donna Langley, has confirmed what many have feared. As many could probably tell from Dracula Untold, is that the films will reimagine the characters and take them “out of the horror genre”.
Her full quite can be read here.
We don’t have any capes [in our film library]. 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’s a shame that it has come to this and even more of a shame that no one seems to get that Marvel is the only one doing the shared film universe right and well. Universal might surprise with some fun films, but if Dracula Untold is any indication, it will be an uphill battle.