Anna Daniels
The Universal monster mash continues! After The Invisible Man broke the box office and garnered great reviews, Universal is amping up to make more and more monster flicks, and here comes another one. James Wan is teaming with the studio to develop a new movie that sounds at least partially inspired by Frankenstein, while not being a direct adaptation. Wan will produce while Supernatural writer Robbie Thompson is penning the script.
THR has the scoop on the James Wan Universal Monster movie. The film is currently untitled, but here’s the synopsis:
Sources say the story takes its cues from Universal’s classic monster legacy and shines it through a modern prism. With shades of Disturbia, the story will focus on a group of teens who discover that a neighbor is building a monster in his basement. Spoiler: the monster gets loose.
The “someone builds a monster and the monster gets loose” plotline is clearly inspired by Frankenstein. Whether or not this film is going to bill itself as a Frankenstein movie or not remains to be seen, but there were rumblings months ago that Wan was potentially involved with a new Frankenstein movie. We were told that that info was inaccurate at the time – but now we have this news.
Wan will produce with his Robot Monster banner, but he won’t be directing the pic, which is always a bit of a downer for me – I want him to direct more horror again! The filmmaker is returning to horror soon with his upcoming directorial effort Malignant, and I was hoping that was a sign he was going to get back into the horror movie directing game for a longer period of time. Alas, it doesn’t seem likely, but his involvement in this project is still promising.
Universal is clearly gunning for more and more monster-related content in the wake of The Invisible Man. They already have titles lined-up: the Dracula spin-off Renfield, Elizabeth Banks’s The Invisible Man (which isn’t connected to The Invisible Man, despite its title), Paul Feig’s Dark Army, which is said to feature classic Universal monsters, and The Monster Mash, which we don’t really know a whole lot about. It was recently reported that Jason Blum’s Blumhouse, who worked together with Universal on Invisible Man, was interested in developing their own Frankenstein. Will that still happen now that Wan’s project has Frankenstein overtones? We shall see. For now, as a fan of the Universal monsters, I’m just happy to see Universal taking new approaches in the wake of their failed Dark Universe.
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