If the Marvel Cinematic Universe goes down in film history as a textbook example of how to build a perfect spider-web of interconnected movies, with each new arrival in multiplexes enriching and adding nuance to those that came before, Universal’s recently deceased “Dark Universe” will surely be remembered as the exact opposite: a cinematic end of line, full stop, dead end.
The rumblings that this one might have breathed its last breath – before it ever really emerged from a thousand-year slumber to embark on a reign of terror – were there from the beginning. After the studio released a weird-looking shot of Tom Cruise (star of The Mummy) with Johnny Depp (the Invisible Man), Russell Crowe (Dr Jekyll) and Javier Bardem (Frankenstein’s monster) in 2017, it emerged that the image had in fact been put together via composite techniques. Even the A-list actors themselves clearly weren’t confident enough in the future of the franchise to find the time to be properly photographed together.
Later that month, The Mummy bombed critically (though it eventually grasped its way to a not-completely terrible $410m worldwide), leading the rest of those remakes to being quietly locked back in the crypt. Until now, that is. For the Hollywood Reporter suggests Universal is resurrecting its plans for The Invisible Man – sans Depp, and with no plans to have the heavily bandaged monstrosity hang out with his monster buddies, Abbott and Costello-style, in future movies this time around.
This can only be a good thing. The studio’s concoction Prodigium, a Dark Universe agency equivalent to Marvel’s SHIELD, complete with green-faced Russell Crowe presumably hamming it up in every movie as Jekyll/Hyde, always looked as clumsily stitched together as Frankenstein’s monster himself. Moreover, the star-focused model for the franchise rather ignored the fact that it is pretty difficult to create a gothic mist of suspense when the key protagonists are among Hollywood’s most famous faces … and we all know they are guaranteed to make it to the end credits.
The presence of Cruise and Crowe in The Mummy unbalanced Alex Kurtzman’s film so severely that it was nearly impossible to recall that this was a film ostensibly designed to chill the spine, so comic were its hamfisted attempts at knockabout action thrills and mega-movie world-building.
Perhaps Universal’s determination to throw a little star power into the mix was predicated on the studio’s own insecurities, for most of the original titles that spawned the classic monster movies of the 1930s are long out of copyright in the US. If another studio wants to make a movie version of HG Wells’s The Invisible Man, it is perfectly entitled to do so, though that studio may not be able to persuade Johnny Depp to get on board.
Nobody yet knows who will be stepping into Claude Rains’s shoes in the new version, but the spirit of James Whale’s original 1933 film and Wells’s source novel surely require that it be an unknown, or at the very least not an instantly recognisable face. Universal has recruited Insidious and Saw’s Leigh Whannell to direct, and it’s clear the studio sees this as a new start with a very different approach to its ill-fated previous plans.
“Throughout cinematic history, Universal’s classic monsters have been reinvented through the prism of each new film-maker who brought these characters to life,” said the studio’s president of production, Peter Cramer. “We are excited to take a more individualised approach for their return to screen, shepherded by creators who have stories they are passionate to tell with them.”
Let us hope Universal really can wrap its latest efforts up in a veil of eerie enigma this time around, rather than batter us around the chops with corny action cliches. If the studio wants to bring its most infamous horror icons back from the dead, it had better make sure to inject them with some real creative electricity.
