Universal Monster Cineverse Will Be Less Horror, More Action
Fan art by tohdaryl
During a round table interview with THR, Donna Langley, chairman of Universal Pictures, gave a big clue to how the Universal Monster Cineverse is going to work. I listened to the panel last week and completely missed this, thankfully Perri Nemiroff of Collider caught this quote.
Langley on the Universal Monster Cineverse:
“We don’t have any capes [in our film library]. But what we do have is an incredible legacy and history with the monster characters. We’ve tried over the years to make monster movies — unsuccessfully, actually. So, we took a good, hard look at it, 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, bringing these incredibly rich and complex characters into present day and reimagine them and reintroduce them to a contemporary audience.”
A few other sites have interpreted this to mean that the movies will be more like superhero films or purely action, I think the truth lies somewhere in between. The Mummy series of movies with Brendan Fraser leaned pretty heavy on the action over the horror roots of the title character. Dracula Untold, the first part of the studio's Monster Cineverse, seems use that same balance. So the horror elements won't be completely excised but greatly overpowered by action.
To help in the continuity for all the Monster Cineverse films, Universal is using a team of writers in the same way sitcoms are written today.
Craig Michael Ranapia on this team based writing style (via io9):
"Actually, it isn't novel in Hollywood at all. Studios (including Universal) used to have stables of writers — and other creatives — under contract working on assigned projects and doing re-writes rather than having them farmed out for draft after draft and a parade of big-ticket script doctors."
If this becomes a winning formula for better scripts, I'm all for it. If successful, I could see a lot of other studios following suit.