Dark Universe: Eric Heisserer knew Universal monster movies wouldn’t work

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Screenwriter Eric Heisserer's credits include Arrival, Final Destination 5, Bird Box, and the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street – and if Universal's Dark Universe plans had worked out, he would also have been credited as a writer on a new version of Van Helsing. Heisserer is now writer and showrunner on the Netflix fantasy series Shadow & Bone, based on the "Grishaverse" novels by Leigh Bardugo, and while he was doing press for the show and this -verse he's working in now, he told The Playlist about his involvement with Universal's failed -verse.

Heisserer said his time in the Dark Universe was "a very strange experience": 

There was certainly a big brain trust of writers around the table. You had a lot of voices and none of them could agree on much. Much like when I’d visit my relatives for Thanksgiving and everyone’s arguing with each other… You had some people saying, ‘Should our monsters all be villains in these movies or can they all be heroes?’ And someone else would say, ‘We can build the plane when we fly it.’ And it’s me and Jon Spaihts at the table going, ‘That’s a terrible analogy. We don’t want to be on that plane. What are we doing here?’"

Heisserer and Spaihts were so baffled by what they were witnessing in the writers room, they decided to team up on Van Helsing.

This is sort of a terrible motivation, but we were also like, ‘You know? I don’t think some of these movies are going to work at all. So what if we create the character that kills the monsters in the movies that don’t work?’ [Laughs]”

As we know now, the very first release under the Dark Universe banner – 2017's The Mummy – was not well received, and even though it made a lot of cash at the box office, the budget was so high that its $400 million haul was considered a disappointment. So Universal scrapped the plan to build the Dark Universe of connected monster movies.

While Heisserer didn't end up with a credit on a Dark Universe movie, his Van Helsing collaborator Jon Spaihts did receive a story credit on The Mummy.