It was already known that Universal Pictures would eventually be rebooting all of its classic monster franchises, including Dracula, Frankenstein and The Mummy, among many others, because mama’s studio needs a new pair of shoes. Now it appears that Universal has a spectacular new vision for history’s scariest fictional monsters, and it involves writers Alex Kurtzman and Chris Morgan developing a new “network of classic characters and stories,” according to Deadline, and that means that we will soon be seeing Drac and Frank fighting each other or side by side. Again.
Kurtzman got his start as a writer on the Kevin Sorbo Hercules series, as well as Xena: Warrior Princess, before he’d go on to receive writing credits for two Transformers films, both recent Star Trek movies, and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and 3, among others. Morgan has written Wanted and five of the Fast and Furious movies, as well as 47 Ronin, which I’m not actually sure had a script. While it’s unknown if they’ll be writing Universal’s new monster pics, they will certainly be the architects of a grand vision.
While Universal has selectively tapped its Movie Monster library for The Mummy, Van Helsing, The Wolfman, and the upcoming Dracula Untold, this will be the first time that the studio has formalized an approach to these classic characters in a cohesive, connected way rather than as a series of stand-alone projects by disparate filmmaking teams.
They’ve begun the meetings to put together an interconnected slate of Monster films, and the first will be a reboot of The Mummy, which will be released April 22, 2016. (Via Deadline)
So if I’m getting this right, and that’s usually a 50-50 shot, we will soon see Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, Wolfman, Invisible Man, Creature from the Black Lagoon and many other monsters on one screen at the same time. It could end up just being another Van Helsing craptasterpiece, or it could be something completely different. Perhaps a reboot of a certain film from 1987 that featured all of these classic monsters working together to take over this realm and destroy the human race…