Things aren’t looking too good for Universal’s Dark Universe.
As is standard for Hollywood’s interwoven franchises, the studio ran the risk of putting the cart before the horse by announcing big-budget fantasy flicks based on cinema’s most iconic creatures – think The Invisible Man and Frankenstein’s Monster – long before The Mummy became the first domino to fall. That was back in June, and after swallowing a financial hit in excess of $95 million, it’s clear that Universal’s classic monsters universe has endured a rocky start.
Where things will go from here remains to be seen, but the studio isn’t letting the beating that their franchise starter took over the summer get them down. Far from it, in fact. As mentioned above, plans have already been mapped out for a rather large shared universe, one that will, through time, carve out room for The Phantom of the Opera, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and a smattering of other famous creatures/monsters plucked from the archives.
But one project that has us particularly excited is Bride of Frankenstein. Beauty and the Beast helmer Bill Condon is attached to the nascent horror pic, and last we heard, the studio’s eyeing Angelina Jolie for the title role.
Additional details have been hard to come by, but in a recent interview with Forbes, Condon opened up a bit about where things are at.
“I’ve got the same team together that made Beauty and the Beast and we’re building big sets and designing big set pieces, so it’s a pretty big movie. We start on February 1st, 2018 so it’s the early days but just to be here in London, starting to see locations and to talk about sets that we’re building, it’s very exciting.”
Continuing on, he 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.”
Casting and further plot details have yet to come to light, but as production continues to heat up, the one question that’s no doubt on everyone’s mind is can Bride of Frankenstein help course-correct the Dark Universe after its rough start? Only time will tell, but while we wait for more to surface, feel free to take to the comments section and let us know what you think.