Universal's MONSTERS Universe- More 'Mash' Less 'Monsters'

 

What began as a whisper and took form this past October with the excellent gothic adventure Dracula Untold starring Luke Evans and Tywin Lannister, has taken some sort of shape at The Hollywood Reporter's Exectuve Roundtable where Universal Chairman Donna Langley spoke on fitting heavy-hitters of old like The Wolfman, The Creature, Dracula, Frankenstein and his Bride, and The Invisible Man into a contemporary megaplex landscape where only capes seem to fly.

Donna and Brad, how do you get into this game? Donna has said that Universal's monster movies are not competitive with the superheroes.

LANGLEY To Alan's point, we have to mine our resources. 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.

While some websites, and fans, have taken these comments with extreme venom, Mrs. Langley isn't exactly wrong.
Monsters, once a prized Saturday night fright of the 50s and 60s, gave way long ago to the more profitable slasher pictures and now have found themselves as the butt of cruel jokes in an era where thrills and chills are mostly felt from torture porn, found footage features, and possession stories.

Superheroes, on the other hand, are currently dominating the cinematic landscape and, as was apparent from Dracula Untold, sometimes these 'monsters' need to lose their teeth and take to the tights- even giving Vlad Teppes (Dracula) a custom set of badass armor and a trademark sword. 

While Universal recently tried to revitalize it's namesake with 2010's The Wolfman, intended to launch a universe with Hugo Weaving as the 'crossover' icon, that failed somewhat, leaving these cinema icons to stagnate. 
With the recent success of Showtime's Penny Dreadful, and shows like Grimm, Supernatural, and Once Upon a Time we know that spooks and ghouls still have a place in modern mythology- just tapping into them on the big screen might be a bit more tricky.

Dracula Untold, made on a $70 million budget, recouped about $200 million worldwide (72% of that earning came from overseas markets) so it was not a failure by any means- and ended with a modern day hook signaling the "Master Vampire" (Charles Dance) having bigger plans for Dracula...and the rest of the monsters as a whole.