The deceptively tricky task of updating Universal’s classic horrors for the modern age
Between the 1930s and the 1950s, Universal Studios leaned heavily on its stable of classic monsters to power the company’s production line of genre fare, with many of them becoming timeless greats and hugely influential touchstones along the way.
Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein remain two of the most instantly recognisable figures in pop culture history, but for whatever reason, Universal’s repeated attempts to reinvent the aforementioned creatures alongside the likes of The Mummy, The Wolfman, and The Invisible Man more often than not tend to fall flat on their faces.
Many of those characters now reside within the public domain and can be made by any filmmaker for any studio, but as it applies strictly to Universal, what used to be the go-to home for the finest and most timeless monster movies in the industry has become a catalogue of bad decisions and money-losing flops, with the odd success story or two managing to break out from the pack.
Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy was a rollicking old-fashioned blockbuster that remains as wickedly entertaining now as it ever did, but the sequel The Mummy Returns was an inferior re-tread with added CGI monstrosities, while Tomb of the Dragon Emperor was an interminable slog. The director tried to have his cake and eat it by cramming Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, and even Mr. Hyde into Hugh Jackman’s Van Helsing, only for the overstuffed mess to indicate trying to repeat the formula was destined to fail.
Not that the studio listened and suffered once again when the troubled production of Benicio del Toro’s $150million spin on The Wolfman tanked at the box office and lost a fortune, even if it did win an Academy Award for ‘Best Makeup’. Surely, that would be a lesson to Universal that investing huge sums of money in trying to breathe new life into its monsters was a mistake, right? Nope.
Dracula Untold reshot its ending to tie into the impending Dark Universe, was promptly discarded as canon by The Mummy director Alex Kurtzman, who then watched his feature-length debut turn to dust right in front of his very eyes and, by extension, kill any plans for Tom Cruise, Russell Crowe, Javier Bardem, and Johnny Depp to anchor the shared universe, while a Bill Condon-directed remake of The Bride of Frankenstein prospectively starring Angelina Jolie was quietly axed.
In 2023, both Chris McKay’s comedic Renfield with Nicolas Cage as Dracula and André Øvredal’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter tanked within four months of each other to add another two notable misfires to Universal’s increasingly spotty track record. Neither of them was particularly expensive compared to what came before, and yet they conspired to end up in the red. Maybe audiences are tired of Dracula, or maybe the desire on the part of audiences is a lot more simple.
Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man was made for a fraction of the cost, recouped its budget 20 times over, and won praise for taking an intimate, filmmaker-driven approach to a well-known property. For an even more recent example, Abigail did much the same thing by enlisting Ready or Not and Scream duo Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett for another inexpensive spin on a Universal staple.
The project was initially revealed to be a remake of 1936’s Dracula’s Daughter, but the potential anchor around its neck was dropped in favour of a cameo appearance from a surprise guest star who kept their cards close to their chest while admitting they’ve been “known by many names” over the years, which was as wink-wink as it got.
Whannell will be hoping to repeat the trick with 2025’s Wolf Man, but as far as Universal at large goes, it’s become apparent that when it comes to the classic monsters, less is more. The big-budget efforts have repeatedly failed, Dracula may well have had his moment in the cinematic sun, and the focus on imagination over expense has yielded the two best films the back catalogue of creatures has enjoyed in a quarter of a century. It might be completely against what Hollywood believes in, but hewing smaller in scale is evidently the way to reap bigger rewards.
