Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman have been a very busy pair of dudes. They have some major projects in the works right now including ‘Star Trek 2’, ‘The Amazing Spider-Man 2’, ‘Ender’s Game’, and the release of ‘People Like Us’. With such huge films like that in the pipeline, it’s easy to forget about a project here and there. That’s why nothing has happened with the duo’s reboot of ‘Van Helsing’ starring Tom Cruise since 2010 until this past May.
In an interview with Crave Online (via Collider), Kurtzman spoke about how they’re approaching the famed vampire slayer this time around. Here’s what he had to say:
“Well, I don’t want to give away too much, because we are actually at the very beginning of talking about what to do with it. But I do feel like the Van Helsing that Anthony Hopkins plays in [Bram Stoker’s] Dracula is sort of the parody version of it, and the Van Helsing that Hugh Jackman played was obviously in a different place as well. I think that these kinds of movies have evolved a lot since then. You know, The Dark Knight was a major, major corner-turning moment in the way that genre and superhero stories could be told. Really grounded in reality. Really grounded in really cool things. That’s what I’d like to do without sacrificing the fantasy element. We aspired to do that as well on Trek, you know, keep it “real.” That’s such a different franchise than ‘Batman’, but that’s really what we wanted to do. And we’d love to do that with ‘Van Helsing’.”
I’ve said before that movies don’t need to be dark to be good, but Van Helsing might be the sort of thing that would benefit from a darker rendition. The last time I saw the character onscreen was Hugh Jackman’s version, and that didn’t work so well because it wasn’t dark enough. In fact, it was pretty light and comedic to me, so going for an appropriately dismal and menacing setting might be the way to go with this one.
As one could guess from all the projects that I listed above, Kurtzman and Orci probably won’t get to ‘Van Helsing’ just yet, especially since their star, Cruise, has a schedule that’s even more packed than theirs, so it’s unlikely that production will start any time soon.
