Universal aims to relaunch their classic movie monsters

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

Please don’t f*ck this up. Universal is looking to Alex Kurtzman and Chris Morgan to bring horror’s most iconic monsters back to the big screen. That’s right, Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf Man, Creature From The Black Lagoon, The Invisible Man, Bride Of Frankenstein, and The Mummy are all in the very hands of Kurtzman and Morgan—some of their work includes TRANSFORMERS, STAR TREK, THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN and THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS franchise. There’s no word on whether or not either of them will actually do any writing, but they will soon be looking for the right talent to bring new cinematic life to these enduring characters from lore, literature and Universal’s own library, reports Deadline.

We already know that Universal has dug into their Movie Monster vault for THE MUMMY, VAN HELSING, THE WOLFMAN, and the upcoming DRACULA UNTOLD, but this will the first time that the studio has approached the classic monsters in a cohesive way rather that just making a stand-alone film. That, to me, is the most important part of this huge undertaking. The fact that they're going into this thing knowing that they want the films and their monsters to exist within the same universe is why this is some pretty exciting news.

Right now it looks like THE MUMMY is the first film on the reboot slate, which will be released on April 22, 2016. There are of course a lot of questions surrounding this news. I'm curious as to what their approach to the design of the creatures are going to be. Will they stay with their classic looks or go for something entirely different? And are these new films going to be set in the modern age or stay with the same time period that the original films were set in? I guess we'll have to wait to hear more before those questions get answered. Sounds cool though, for now.