Last year Universal hired Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci to write a script for a Van Helsing reboot. Didn’t the first movie in 2004 already say everything that needed to be said about Van Helsing? Were people clamoring for more? Did the Brass Buckle Association lobby for a reboot to make buckle jackets cool? Damn it, Brass Buckle Association, stop trying to make buckle jackets happen.
However, it sounds like the buckle people got to Universal chairman Adam Fogelsen, who tells THR they’re still working on the reboot.
“Universal monsters are probably the thing people most equate with our library. But monsters are not superheroes. Virtually every monster story is by definition a tragic story. We are developing another Mummy. We are looking at rebooting Van Helsing because I think the idea for the Van Helsing story was a great way of solving the question of, ‘How do you make a blockbuster out of monsters?’ I think of what we have done with Fast and Furious [the sixth installment opens in May], of what we did with American Pie this past year — we had our best year box office-wise and our biggest movie [Battleship] was a whiff, so we did it without a single traditional franchise tentpole movie. Not one.”
If you’re having your most profitable year on the back of yet another sequel to Fast and Furious and American Pie, maybe don’t remind people it’s your best year. Universal is the last major studio to never have grossed a billion dollars on a single movie. Other studios have Marvel and DC and Harry Potter and James Bond. Universal has public domain monster stories and nostalgic pie-f*cking. So, yeah, another Mummy and a Van Helsing reboot. Somebody call Vin Diesel and see if he’s willing to don a buckle jacket and f*ck a pie. That’s called synergy.
[Picture via Movpins.]