The Universal Monsters have been getting remade and rebooted for decades now, but the studio have still never managed to maintain the level of consistency that characterized the classic streak of originals that gave us Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein and Lon Chaney Jr.’s The Wolf Man throughout the 1930s and 40s.
Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy was a massive box office hit and remains a cult favorite to this day, but since the turn of the 21st Century, the results have been mixed at best. Sommers failed to repeat the trick with the overstuffed Van Helsing, Joe Johnston’s The Wolfman suffered from a tortured production and bombed hard, and both Dracula Untold and Tom Cruise’s The Mummy attempted to kick off a new franchise and flopped spectacularly.
The infamous Dark Universe had already recruited Cruise, Russell Crowe, Javier Bardem and Johnny Depp, with Angelina Jolie being eyed for Bill Condon’s remake of The Bride of Frankenstein before the whole thing imploded on itself, and during this brief flurry of activity, Dwayne Johnson found himself being linked with the latest stab at The Wolfman, which never came to fruition.
However, insider Daniel Richtman now claims that the Hobbs & Shaw star is back in talks with Universal for an as yet unnamed horror movie, but it obviously won’t be the aforementioned pic, which has The Invisible Man‘s Leigh Whannell directing and Ryan Gosling set to play the title role. There are currently over a dozen projects in various stages of development that involve the Universal Monsters in some fashion, though, so there are a number of potential star vehicles that may have caught Johnson’s eye. Or, it could even be something else altogether that’s not been announced yet.
