There’s a special place in infamy reserved exclusively for the Dark Universe, which is without a doubt the single worst attempt at building a shared universe the industry has ever seen.
Dracula Untold was intended to be the first installment in the resurgent horror saga – and even reshot its ending to connect to the present-day timeline – but it was completely cast aside by Tom Cruise’s The Mummy, which then tanked so spectacularly the entire operation was completely abandoned one movie in.
The photo of Cruise, Sofia Boutella, Russell Crowe, Javier Bardem, and Johnny Depp assembling like the Avengers has become a laughing stock in the years since, and a glaring example of why no franchise should try and burst into a sprint before it’s even learned how to master the art of crawling. And yet, Netflix could be attempting the exact same thing, and we’re totally on board with it.
Why? Well, according to producer J. Miles Dale in an interview with A.Frame, Guillermo del Toro’s in-development take on Frankenstein for the streaming service could open the doors to an entire interconnected set of stories focusing on fearsome beasts of legend, and the three-time Academy Award winner is the perfect person to orchestrate it.
“At one time, he was going to do the Monster Universe with Universal – Frankenstein’s Bride, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Invisible Man, The Wolf Man – and he didn’t. We feel like Shape of Water was kind of a version of a creature. So now, here he is doing his own Monster Universe.”
Netflix’s Frankenstein reportedly has Andrew Garfield, Oscar Isaac, and Mia Goth locked in for its three lead roles, and with del Toro at the helm, the unthinkable is a genuine reality: Dark Universe V2.0 is something worth getting genuinely excited about.