Universal’s new monster universe has been taken “out of the horror genre”

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

God dammit, Universal, you had one job. This is why we can't have nice things. You could see it coming from a mile away after they first announced that THE MUMMY reboot was going to be an action-adventure tentpole, and then rushing DRACULA UNTOLD into the conversation after some quick reshoots. I'm not surprised, just annoyed. During a roundtable with studio heads from Fox, Paramount, Disney, IFC Films and Warner Bros., Donna Langley of Universal dropped a soul-crushing bomb on their rebooted Monsterverse. So, if you’re cool with seeing some of horror’s most iconic monsters being turned into the f*cking AVENGERS, then I guess you’ll be pretty happy to hear that Universal has decided to move their monsters “out of the horror genre”. Someone please tell me we're being trolled by Universal right now. Anyone?

Here’s what Langley had to say per 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.” Ha-f*cking-ha. Because we could totally use another VAN HELSING, right?

What part of monster do these guys not understand? I get it, they want to make money by taking the Marvel approach to their newly rebooted universe, but these aren’t superheroes. They’re monsters. Well, they used to be anyway. I didn't have much faith in this thing to begin with, but now I've completely lost interest. I hope I'm wrong about this whole thing, I really do, but right now it sounds like this is going to be one big steaming pile of werewolf shit.