Chris Morgan on the mistakes of Universal’s scrapped Dark Universe franchise

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

I love the Universal Monsters; Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, The Mummy, The Wolf Man, The Gill-Man, and more. The movies featuring those characters are some of my favourites, so when the studio announced their plans to bring all the classic monsters together in a cinematic universe, I was intrigued.

Alex Kurtzman and Chris Morgan were set to oversee the franchise, known as Dark Universe, and the first film in the new series would be THE MUMMY. Tom Cruise signed on to star in the film, which would also include an appearance from Russell Crowe, who would be playing Dr. Henry Jekyll/Mr. Edward Hyde. Future installments in the Dark Universe franchise were set into motion as well, including THE INVISIBLE MAN (starring Johnny Depp) and BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (starring Javier Bardem), but as we know, the critical and commercial failure of THE MUMMY caused everything to come crashing down. Chris Morgan recently spoke with io9 about HOBBS & SHAW, but he was also asked if he had any regrets about the whole Dark Universe experiment.

I don’t [have] regrets or anything like that. I think it’s just, you know, I think it probably was trying to come together too quickly, I would say. And I think everyone got to take a breath and take a step back and take a look at it, and now just focus on maybe doing it a little bit slower.

Although Universal scrapped the Dark Universe fairly quickly, the studio later announced that they would be charting a new course away from an interconnected universe and instead focus on bringing in creative directors with distinctive visions for the classic monsters. "I think Universal’s going about the monster films the right way," Morgan said regarding the new direction. "Which is to really focus on taking a good script, good story, put it out there, if you’re going to build a universe build it from something strong like that. And I think they’re not so much worried about putting a universe out there as they are making great monster films, so I’m looking forward to seeing them." The first film under this new focus will be THE INVISIBLE MAN, which is currently shooting under the direction of Leigh Whannell (UPGRADE), who also wrote the script, and stars Elisabeth Moss (The Handmaid's Tale), Storm Reid (A WRINKLE IN TIME), and Oliver Jackson-Cohen (The Haunting of Hill House). THE INVISIBLE MAN is set for a March 13, 2020 release, so we'll be seeing our first look at Universal's new stab at their classic monsters before we know it.