No matter how many failures they endure, the Universal Monsters will keep getting rebooted and reinvented until the end of time, with the 21st Century in particular not being very kind to the studio’s legendary stable of things that go bump in the night.
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, The Wolfman and Dracula Untold were all major critical and commercial disappointments, while the Dark Universe experiment was a disaster of epic proportions, roping in a huge number of A-list stars before a single frame of footage had even been shot, only for Tom Cruise’s The Mummy to go down in the history books as a massive bomb.
The success of Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man changed all of that in an instant, though, with the low budget chiller raking in $143 million on a $7 million budget and rocketing to an impressive 91% score on Rotten Tomatoes. And now, there are eleven Universal Monsters movies in various stages of development ranging from Whannell’s own The Wolfman with Ryan Gosling to Overlord director Julius Avery’s Van Helsing.
One of the more interesting projects was Paul Feig’s Dark Army, which was announced to be in the works in September 2019, with the man behind Bridesmaids and The Heat writing an original script that involved the various monsters in some fashion. However, based on comments he’s made in a recent interview, it sounds like the film is a long way away from entering production.
“Oh, Dark Army. I love that project so much. I think the studio thinks it’s a little too expensive, perhaps. God as my witness, I’m gonna make that movie. I’m so obsessed with making that movie. I love it. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever written. It’s one of my favorite lead characters I’ve ever come up with. So, fingers crossed that we will make it someday.”
Audiences might not be too keen on the idea of Feige diving back into effects-heavy fantasy after the Ghostbusters reboot, but from the sounds of things, we won’t be seeing Dark Army any time in the immediate future, if it even ends up happening at all.
