It’s been close to a year since we were treated to Universal’s reboot of their monster franchise into some sort of Avengers-esque mosh pit of despair with Dracula Untold. If you managed to sit through that film, you saw the story of Vlad Dracula becoming a vampire to battle back the Turkish horde in some sort of action-packed, blood-sucking romp in Transylvania (and modern day London for some reason). Universal then planted rumblings that it was the beginning of a new shared universe for the classic Universal Monsters and, The Mummy was the next on the slate to be remade as an action/adventure piece.
Not so fast, though, according to the folks over at Birth.Movies.Death. They’ve read the script for The Mummy and sat in at TCA to hear screenwriter Alex Kurtzman discuss the monster films and the rumor that all of the horror was going to be sucked out of the franchises (I went there):
I think there was some lost in translation quality to the way it was received, because I promise you there will be horror in these movies. It is our life goal to make a horror movie. The tricky part is actually how you combine horror with either adventure or suspense or action and be true to all the genres together. In some way, Mummy, dating all the way back to the Karloff movie, was the first to do that. It was the first to combine horror with — I wouldn’t say action, but certainly a lot of suspense. So it’s more about how you blend the different elements and stay true to each one, but there will definitely be horror in the monster movies…We will hopefully serve it up good and plenty.
Well, good for them. As Birth.Movies.Death puts it, the success of Jurassic World and Universal having a positive run might allow them to reevaluate their monster movies and provide something that isn’t Dracula Untold. Then again, it made $200 million on a $70 million budget. What do I know? Let’s get a Mummy, Frankenstein, Dracula team movie going and have them all fight the people making these movies about them for close to a hundred years. I’d pay to see that movie.
(Via Birth.Movies.Death)
