Universal was banking on a lot, casting sequels and teasing more monsters to come even before The Mummy had come out - they even released a 'cast photo' of Tom Cruise, Sofia Boutella, Russell Crowe, Johnny Depp, and Javier Bardem, who had just been announced to play Frankenstein's monster in the Bride of Frankenstein movie. If The Mummy had done well, Evans' Dracula would likely have appeared in a following film.

It was meant to be an origin story for the character, rather than sticking to the familiar Dracula tale, and includes a scene of Dracula and Charles Dance's evil vampire Caligula in the present day at the very end, as if setting the characters up for more.

The Dark Universe actually started not with The Mummy, but with 2014's Dracula Untold, which starred Luke Evans as Vlad Dracula, and tried very hard to marry a very creative version of 'history' with Bram Stoker's vampire character, to pretty much no success. Given all of that, you may be wondering if Leigh Whannell's new horror film The Invisible Man, which is a Universal movie based on a monster character from a classic book, is in any way related to the Dark Universe mess.Īh, Dark Universe, we hardly knew you.

The Mummy absolutely tanked, was a critical failure, and the studios' other upcoming properties, including its Bride of Frankenstein and Wolf Man movies, were put on hold. is attempting with Kong: Skull Island and its Godzilla movies. With The Mummy, Universal Pictures launched and, at the same time, annihilated what they had planned to call the Dark Universe, a series of films centered around the studio's classic monster properties, from Dracula to Frankenstein to the Creature from the Black Lagoon, that would all be intricately tied together - like what Marvel is doing with its comic book superheroes and what Warner Bros. The one starring Tom Cruise? And Sofia Boutella? And an undead Jake Johnson, for some reason? You remember, right? You don't? Well, that's fine, because it was terrible: an embarrassingly bad cash-grab from a company needlessly trying to make a Marvel Cinematic Universe out of whatever they had available, focusing on all the wrong parts of what made their classic horror properties great in the first place. No, not The Mummy with Brendan Fraser, the other Mummy, from 2017. You may recall, a few years ago, tales of a movie called The Mummy.

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