Last year we found out that Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman were taking on’The Mummy’ and ‘Van Helsing’. Since that time we haven’t heard too much but thats honestly not that surprising as the two have been involved with the new ‘Transformers‘ cartoon, ‘Star Trek 3‘, ‘Sagittarius‘, ‘Ender’s Game‘, ‘Sleepy Hallow‘, and more!
Clearly that’s why there was a delay on news, right? Wrong! According to a recent interview, there might just be so much more in the works. According to Orci, he and writing/producing partner Kurtzman are planning a full on Universal monsters universe, mash ups and all! It’s a move that could either be brilliant or hearken back to the days where they tried combining franchises which ended up disastrously causing monster films to be shelved for quite some time. Here’s what Orci had to say about it:
“There’s an interesting thing that could happen at Universal where they have this amazing library of their old monsters and these kinds of heroes, and the idea of trying to create a universe. Van Helsing, and we’re also producing The Mummy for them. We’re kind of imagining updating these kinds of things. You don’t want to just make remakes when you’re doing a thing, unless it’s worthy of being a remake, but when you have an idea for something that can actually be made different and yet be true to what it was. We just had a notion of how to make it modern and have a slightly different tone. It’s not going to be just a remake.”
This plan that could give us a connected universe of the Universal Monsters has a lot of potential. From the classics, Universal owns the rights to The Wolfman, Dracula, The Mummy, Van Helsing, Frankenstein, the Invisible Man, the Creature From the Black Lagoon, and a few lesser known characters.
This isn’t a confirmed course of action quite yet and just appears to be in the development phase. Still though, if done right a connected universe could absolutely work on the big screen. Clearly ‘The Avengers‘ has proven that a few billion times over. Could it work for horror as well? If done right, I think this is a solid idea that has a chance. Now it is a wait and see if it’ll get approved by Universal and if Orci and Kurtzman can pull it off!
What do you think about a combined universe for monsters? Would you be down if they made it dark and not cheesy? Share your thoughts below!
Source: Blastr