Universal details plan for upcoming monsters franchise

Universal is rebooting all of their classic monsters, and we finally have some updates about how that's coming along.

In a new interview with Variety, Alex Kurtzman and Chris Morgan, the writers who are overseeing this entire project, discussed some of their plans. One interesting tidbit is that once the series gets going, Universal plans to release one monster movie every single year. It all starts with The Mummy, which begins shooting in early 2016.

The franchise will evidently be more down to Earth than ever before, mixing the classic series with elements of modern movies.

“This is not a heightened world,” Morgan told Variety. “We’re exploring issues of family identity and questions of, ‘Where do I belong in the world?’"

In order to prepare, Kurtzman and Morgan say they both obsessively watched all of the movies in Universal's monsters catalog to get a good sense of the genre, throwing in some Hammer Horror films as well. Their team of artists is hard at work creating the look of the new monsters, and each of the 10 franchise writers has been assigned one character to oversee.

Morgan notes that he's a huge horror aficionado, staying home from school as a kid to watch films like Cat People on TV. He also said that after a decade of superheroes, audiences are ready for a change of pace.

“Heroes tend to be perfect, but most people in an audience aren’t ever going to know what it’s like to be the smartest, strongest or fastest person alive,” Morgan says. “But there’s a darkness inside everybody. And everyone wants to be able to turn a curse into empowerment. The monsters have been in the shadows, and now it’s time to bring them out into the light.”

The Mummy will hit theaters on March 24, 2017, possibly with a female mummy this time. After that, films about the other monsters will be on the way, and the plan is to have them all interact with one another across movies.

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