When a media property fails spectacularly, announces itself with tremendous ambition before swiftly failing to live up to its barest expectations, it is both educational and fun to dissect its corpse. Perhaps the highest-profile failure of recent memory is Universal Studios' attempt to recreate Marvel’s success by interweaving their catalog of iconic movie monsters into the short-lived Dark Universe.
Most viewers would agree, the original, or at least the most prominent, example of the interconnected cinematic universe concept is Marvel’s ever-expanding media empire. This model is hugely popular and very well-received, but only a couple of competitors have managed to emerge. This is not for lack of trying, as some competitors rose to the challenge, only to die a grisly death.
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In 2017, Universal releasedThe Mummy, a remake of the decades-long horror-action franchise which is perhaps best rememberedfor Brendan Fraser’s hit trilogy. The film, like the 1999 trilogy before it, shifted the tone away from horror and towards adventure. The film was also absolutely dreadful, attracting derision from all sides and flopping hard at the box office.
Unoriginality seemed to be the watch-word of the project; nothing inThe Mummyfelt new and worse yet, its version was almost always worse than whatever it ripped off. Its slim merits as a standalone film were buried under near-constant nods towards future projects. The universe-management crossover moments that Marvel typically saved for the post-credits scenes take up a hugechunk ofThe Mummy’s runtime. All of that failure comes in the very first movie to carry the ill-fated Dark Universe logo in its opening moments, spelling doom for the concept before it really began.
Before the release ofThe Mummy,the Dark Universe conceptwas heavily promoted. Numerous projects that were set to follow the Tom Cruise classic after its assumed massive success. Javier Bardem was set to star in a remake ofFrankenstein,The Creature from the Black Lagoonwas announced, and perhaps most fascinatingly, Johnny Depp was cast to lead a remake ofThe Invisible Man. Of course, none of this was meant to be.
The Mummycrashed and burned, seemingly taking the entire brand with it and canceling the near dozen films prematurely announced by the overambitious studio. The concept seemed dead and gone, but a hero emerged to put their own spin on one of the existing projects and create a film that would singlehandedly point out and fix the big problem behind the Dark Universe. That hero wasSawseries creator Leigh Whannell, and that film was 2020’sThe Invisible Man.
The Invisible Manwas a blueprintfor the monster movie concept, different in every way from its predecessor and standing as a monument to the previous universe’s failures. Whannell’sInvisible Manwas an insightful horror film that recontextualized the classic H. G. Wells story into a modern nightmare. Clever, innovative, scary, successful;The Invisible Manwas everythingThe Mummywas not. The title character, a villainous man who abuses his invisibility to harm others for his own gain, shifts from the main character to the monster of someone else’s story. The film and its Invisible Man stand-alone, a well-executed horror film that doesn’t need an interconnected universe to support interest.The Invisible Man’s success was easily predictable by those who’d already observed the autopsy of the Dark Universe, because the film doubled as a two-hour masterclass about everything wrong with the previous brand.
The Universal Monsters are not superheroes. They don’t band together for a common cause, or put aside their differences to face a larger foe, or really have much of anything to do with each other. The Marvel Cinematic Universe model works great for comic book superheroes, because that genre is already packed with crossovers, character interplay and team-based stories. Universal Monsters are certainly varied, but they are, at their core, horror movie antagonists. Most of them are based on seminal works of fiction; fromFrankenstein, the first science fiction story toDracula, the biggest name in gothic horror.
Taking these iconic characters, removing everything that makes them special and shoving them unceremoniously into a proven popular format is lazy, cynical, desperate and evidently, doomed to well-deserved failure. Slapping the iconography of these movie monsters onto cliche superhero action only serves to denigrate both mediums. It is clear that only by maintaining, and indeed updating, the Universal Monsters can they succeed today. But, thankfully, there may be hope yet.
After the success ofThe Invisible Man, the reports of the Dark Universe’s death appear to have been greatly exaggerated. The concept has been revived but in a wholly new form. No mention of the MCU style interconnectivity has been made and none of the previous projects seem to be still in production. Instead, new films were placed on the docket. Whannell is set to return to the Dark Universe with atake onThe Wolfmanstarring Ryan Gosling.Renfieldis a gruesome comedy about Dracula’s minion produced byWalking Deadwriter Robert Kirkman.
The Invisible Womandirected by and starring Elizabeth Banks is promised to feature no crossover with its almost identically named predecessor. All this and more is set to come from the seemingly dead brand, from a variety of creative voices with wildly different reimaginings of these classic concepts. Perhaps this is one Hollywood disaster from whichthe right lessons were finally learned.
