I’ve been getting kind of excited about the shared Universal Monster Cinematic Universe for quite some time but now it would appear that the plan for them is not to create horror movies. I’ll let that sink in for a second… the shared Universal Monster Movie Universe which has such creatures as Dracula, The Mummy, The Wolf Man‘, and more will not be horror movies. While I understand that the ‘Dracula Untold’ introduction to the universe wasn’t overly thought of as horror (I really had high hopes for the rest), this new universe that has Alex Kurtzman and Chris Morgan involved sounds like the reboots will not be following the horror genre after all.
Recently at an executive round table meeting Universal Pictures chairman Donna Langley said that the shared universe will fall more into the action-adventure category:
“We have to mine our resources. We don’t have any capes [in our film library]. But what we do have is an incredible legacy and history with the monster characters. We’ve tried over the years to make monster movies — unsuccessfully, actually. So, we took a good, hard look at it, and we settled upon an idea, which is to take it out of the horror genre, put it more in the action-adventure genre and make it present day, bringing these incredibly rich and complex characters into present day and re-imagine them and reintroduce them to a contemporary audience.”
With ‘Dracula Untold’ not being a huge commercial hit, it seems like things aren’t going well for this brave new plan right off the bat. That being said, it won’t be until the 2016 release of ‘The Mummy’ where we’ll see these once-horror characters brought to modern day times.
What do you thin about having these horror characters removed from the horror genre and put into an action-adventure series instead? Do you think Universal is making the right choice here or should they have stuck with the one set of monster characters that were off the screen for long enough of a period of time to actually be able to take advantage of a reboot?
Source: Screen Rant
