By Travis Johnson
We already knew that Universal were very confident of The Mummy, announcing the day after the Australian premiere that they already have several other films in their Dark Universe line in development.
Well, now we can add a couple more. Director of The Mummy and Dark Universe honcho Alex Kurtzman recently dropped a few more familiar names in an interview with Fandom:
“We know we’re going to do Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Phantom of the Opera, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Invisible Man,”
In-ter-est-ing.
Let’s go through the list. Frankenstein was kind of a gimme, seeing as Bride of Frankenstein has already been announced, but it looks like we’ll be getting Bill Condon’s BoF first. Dracula – well, you’ve gotta have Dracula, even though the last swing of the bat struck out. Creature from the Black Lagoon is a nice addition – they’ve been trying to do something with that property for years. John Carpenter was attached at one point back in the day, and if you’re really jonesing for some Gillman action, Sandy Collora’s recent short, Shallow Water, is worth a look. And of course, we have The Invisible Man with Johnny Depp, who is much better off being invisible these days.
Then have Hunchback of Notre Dame and Phantom of the Opera towards the end there, and that’s the real news. Both of them seem like odd choices, verging on the unworkable. Dark Universe’s schtick seems to be taking these classic monsters and re-contextualising them for a modern setting, and those two in particular would take a lot of work to fit in the current cultural milieu. Taken as read, they’re a couple of guys with disabilities raging against the world that shuns them – that is not going to play well in Peoria, and Universal clearly isn’t going to go balls to the wall in the same way that, say, Brian de Palma did when he made The Phantom of the Paradise – they’re going for a much different tone. It could be that someone on the Dark Universe writers room has really cracked it, but at first glance its hard to see how.
Still, there you have it – eight films in total on the slate, counting The Mummy. It’ll be interesting to see how many are still there after opening weekend numbers come in.
