The single biggest problem to blight almost every shared universe to spring up in the aftermath of Kevin Feige’s unstoppable Marvel empire is that thee majority of them tried to run before they’d even bothered learning how to crawl, but none failed harder and faster than the Dark Universe.
Sure, we’ve seen plenty of would-be mythologies overextend themselves right out of the gate, but none suffered the hilarious misfortunes to constantly plague Universal’s ambitious resurrection of its classic monsters. Dracula Untold was supposed to be the opening chapter, and even reshot its ending to tie it into future films, only for The Mummy director Alex Kurtzman to cast it out of canon as soon as he signed on.
The infamous photo featuring Tom Cruise, Russell Crowe, Sofia Boutella, Javier Bardem, and Johnny Depp has instantly became the stuff of legend when The Mummy was torn to shreds by critics, failed to turn a profit at the box office, and then served as the only reminder the Dark Universe was even supposed to be a thing.
If you can believe it, we’re not exactly six years removed from that fateful day, and it would be an understatement to say social media has been having a field day.
Goodbye, Dark Universe, how we hardly knew ye. On the plus side, if anyone wants to know how not to assemble an interconnected series of blockbuster films, then the blueprint is sitting right there in front of them. It isn’t exactly the one that got away, but it’s definitely the one we’re glad we ended up avoiding.