THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN Remake Was Going to Be a "Beautiful, Gothic Horror" Film Spanning 150 Years
I was kind of curious to see how Universal Pictures’ Dark Universe was going to turn out. As you know they had big plans for their classic monster movie universe as they were going to remake films such as Dracula, The Wolfman, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, and Frankenstein. One of the projects I was most interested in, though, was their remake of The Bride of Frankenstein.
The Bride of Frankenstein is my favorite Universal monster movie and the remake was being developed by director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters) with a screenplay written by David Koepp (Jurassic Park). But, the Dark Universe ended pretty quickly after Tom Cruise’s The Mummy was released. That movie sucked, and it completely bombed at the box office.
Well, we now have some details to share regarding what The Bride of Frankenstein remake could have been thanks to Koepp. In a recent interview with Collider, he revealed how ambitious the project was going to be. He explained:
"I did a couple different versions. That one was a dramatic history. It was gearing up, it was gonna be a great big movie. Bill Condon was gonna direct it and then 'The Mummy' detonated and that all fell apart. Then I did a much smaller version and I thought that was interesting, but that didn't quite work out. I think someone else is taking a try now. So, I don't know. I felt like 'Bride Of Frankenstein' is a treasure, obviously, and it doesn't belong to me. And I got two really good cracks at it, so definitely fair to let someone else have a try. So I don't know what will work out with that."
When sharing some details about the story he came up with, he shared:
"It was going to be a very big lavish, beautiful, gothic horror production. And one idea I liked was the first thirty or forty pages took place in the 1870s as the Frankenstein movies do and then [The Bride] became sort of inert for 150 years and was rediscovered and reawakened in the present day. And I thought that was cool."
Damn, that sounds like it would have been cool! It’s a shame that the project never moved forward. When previously talking about the movie Condon said:
“For me, the James Whale movie is really right there in the pantheon for me. As you know, the Bride is a character who appears in the last five minutes and then is destroyed, so it’s a way to almost continue the movie that you imagine the movie he might have made the third Frankenstein movie but in 2018.”
It doesn’t sound like this is the version of the remake that we’ll see. But, I actually like the idea and I wish Universal would have stuck with it. Oh well, at least we can always go back and enjoy the original film.