Because films aren’t worth shit these days unless there’s a full universe of characters from different films only invented or rebooted to pop up in each other’s projects, there might now be a Universal Classic Monsters universe on the cards if writer/producer duo Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci have their evil way. Buoyed by the success of The Avengers, and every film since, Orci and Kurtzman have cast a cynical eye over various unused properties and, through sheer luck, have come upon the Universal monster catalogue.
They’re hoping that their upcoming reboots of Van Helsing and The Mummy will generate enough interest and, more importantly, profit to loot the respected back-catalogue of an iconic film stable, turning the cherished memories of many a moviegoer into a sanitised, moronic, gore-soaked joke.
The stable includes Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy, the Wolf Man and the Ape Woman, among others. To really get to the nub of the thinking behind this, you need to consider which of these creatures would appeal to the PG-13 market. That’s the key to understanding this potential series. That’s the level it’ll be working at.
In an interview with IGN, Orci justified himself thusly:
There’s an interesting thing that could happen at Universal where they have this amazing library of their old monsters and these kinds of heroes, and the idea of trying to create a universe. Van Helsing, and we’re also producing The Mummy for them. We’re kind of imagining updating these kinds of things. You don’t want to just make remakes when you’re doing a thing, unless it’s worthy of being a remake, but when you have an idea for something that can actually be made different and yet be true to what it was. We just had a notion of how to make it modern and have a slightly different tone. It’s not going to be just a remake.
You know, the standard remake spiel. They said it before Rob Zombie’s dire Halloween reboot, before the awful Nightmare on Elm Street remake, and they’re saying it now. Let’s hold hands, cross our fingers, and pray this doesn’t happen. Pray to Doctor Frankenstein himself.
