With the news of Universal's new shared universe of monster movies, were you excited to see a resurgence of classic horror to theaters? Well, as it turns out, that's not quite what's happening.
We previously reported that Universal has a shared universe of monster movies planned that will include reboots of films such as The Mummy and The Wolf Man.
But like this year's Dracula Untold, all of these new movies will be action-adventure films, not horror films.
In a round-table interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Universal head Donna Langley talked about the upcoming movies. She said the company has a huge legacy of monster characters and said that they realized the "horror genre has a ceiling; it's not global."
Langley said that they took a hard look at the monster characters 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."
This is pretty disappointing news for a lot of horror fans who were hoping to see bone chilling reboots of some of the classic films. Many were excited to see a genuinely scary Mummy reboot after the three Brendan Fraser films.
Most would argue that the horror-factor is what made all these characters so popular and loved to begin with. It sounds like this could easily lead to these monsters making up a bunch of super generic action movies where the lead or the villain just happens to have some sort of supernatural qualities to them.
The initial news had some believing that a shared universe of horror film characters was in play. That's something we haven't seen in a long time, but with Marvel and DC, we have plenty of shared universe action-adventure films.
If the reception of Dracula Untold is any indication, this franchise might be headed down a doomed path. That movie also took the action-adventure route, stripping out most of the horror, and ended up receiving a 24% on Rotten Tomatoes and grossing $55 million domestically on a $70 million budget.
Dracula Untold was not originally intended to be part of Universal's shared universe, even though an epilogue scene was shot later on to connect it to the upcoming movies, as we previously reported. The first film that was conceived as part of the shared universe will be The Mummy in 2016, so this should give us our first indication of how successful this franchise might be.