Universal's new cinematic monster universe endeavor is sounding more and more like a desperate attempt to appeal to an audience I never knew existed. We learned the new initiative is to revive and reimagine the classic monsters for a modern audience; and those are apparently people that want to see the horror taken out of the whole picture. During a recent roundtable with different studio heads Donna Langley from Universal talked about the changes coming to the iconic characters.
Her quote Via THR:
"We don’t have any capes [in our film library]. But what we do have is an incredible legacy and history with the monster characters. We’ve tried over the years to make monster movies — unsuccessfully, actually. So, we took a good, hard look at it, and we settled upon an idea, which is to take it out of the horror genre, put it more in the action-adventure genre and make it present day, bringing these incredibly rich and complex characters into present day and reimagine them and reintroduce them to a contemporary audience."
I can’t even picture what that is. Why not come up with original ideas rather than take an existing legacy and turning it upside down? The Mummy and The Wolfman don’t need to go the route of DRACULA UNTOLD and while we're at it, not everything has to be BATMAN BEGINS! Taking horror out of the monster movies isn’t going to work; as badly as they want the money Marvel characters bring in, this isn’t the way to do it. You didn't make successful movies with them before? So maybe ask yourselves why; I doubt it was because of the lack of action scenes with Frankensein walking away from an exploding castle. Shit, that’s going to happen now I know it.
Would you watch a monster movie without the element of horror?
Those who do not learn from history…