Hollywood: Why Won't You Reboot the Universal Monsters?

We live in a time full of reboots and remakes. This is not a controversial statement, of course. It is easy to see that Hollywood is running low on ideas, frequently recycling the same, time-proven properties over and over again. This is not inherently a bad thing, necessarily. I mean, if all of these remakes of classic films were good then it would be a lot easier to swallow the fact that there was such an abundance of them. But as it stands right now, so, so many of them are, for lack of a better word, disposable filler, made simply with the hopes of filling theater seats and at least breaking even with their budgets.

In 2017, the classic Universal Horror film, The Mummy, received a remake starring Tom Cruise. This film was intended to be the launching point for a new shared universe of films based on classic Universal Horror. Rebooting Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Dracula. This, in concept, was an exciting no and it failed terribly. It bombed, bringing in only $410 million, losing almost $95 million. The plans for the shared universe, called the Dark Universe, were canned shortly after the film's release.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and try to analyze why a film from six years ago failed. Simply put, it was a generic, by the numbers action film that replaced the Mummy’s roots as a monster of horror into a superhero plot. Instead, what I want to do is ask the simple question: Why have we not gotten a good reboot on any classic Universal Monsters, at least since Brenden Fraser's iteration in the 1990s? Why are they so hard to successfully reproduce?

It should be noted that this year, 2023, will see the release of two Dracula films. April’s Renfield, which I’ve not yet seen yet but heard relatively positive reviews of, and The Last Voyage of the Demeter, which has yet to release as of the writing of this piece. But, despite how good these films might be (and how good I hope they are), neither is a truly “classic” Dracula film. Renfield is a superhero inspired, horror-comdey focusing on Dracula’s servant in the modern day, and Last Voyage of the Demeter, while still a horror movie, trades in Dracula’s aristocratic persona for a more animalistic vampire. Neither of these movies are classic Dracula.

Frankenstein has had an even more difficult time lately. 2015’s Victor Frankenstein was more of an origin story for the titular scientist, and less of a monster/horror film. 2014’s I, Frankenstein is an even further departure for the classic monster, being set in the present day, and focusing on the monster (named Adam in this version) battling demons and gargoyles. Like Dracula, Frankenstein has been lacking a truly classical take on the story.

Wolfman, Invisible Man, the Mummy, and so on have seen their fairshare of remakes as well. 2020’s Invisible Man by Blumhouse Productions was a popular take, yet still a drastic reinvention, using the titular “monster” as a metaphor for domestic abuse. Not a bad take, but again a reinvention.

It should be noted that I am not saying that every film iteration of these characters needs to be exactly the same. There is certainly room for reinvention. In fact, it is necessary to keep these brands new and fresh. But when it becomes the norm to reinvent these properties, or to reduce them to parody (see Hotel Transylvannia), these characters end up feeling aimless. Reinvention and deconstruction only works when you have the classic interpretation to pair it up against, and when it seems like Hollywood is almost embarrassed to allow true, classic versions of these characters to be made, it leaves the reinvented versions feeling hollow. The same is true for any character existing within the Public Domain, whether it’s Sherlock Holmes, King Arthur, Alice in Wonderland, or H.P. Lovecraft’s the Cthullu Mythos. If everything is a reinvention, then nothing is, because there is nothing to reinvent in the first place.