In the wake of the record-breaking success of Scream 7, his latest film which has just hit theaters worldwide, screenwriter and director Kevin Williamson has announced his next project, and it looks quite intriguing: a reboot of the Dark Universe in the form of a TV series.
That’s right: several years after the flop of Tom Cruise’s The Mummy—which, as is well known, was supposed to launch Universal Pictures’ cinematic Dark Universe—iconic characters from the Universal library, such as Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolf Man, Dracula, and other classic Universal monsters, are coming to TV thanks to a new original series produced by the on-demand streaming platform Netflix and created by Kevin Williamson.
There aren’t many other details yet, but the creator himself has described the project as an adult version of The Vampire Diaries: “Netflix and Universal were very kind to let me direct Scream 7 and put some projects on hold, which I’m now focusing on,” Kevin Williamson told Esquire magazine during a recent promotional interview. “What I’m writing right now is a series. We could call it an adult version of The Vampire Diaries. It’s set in the world of Universal monsters. I can play with some of those characters, like Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolf Man, and have a little fun…”
The classic Universal monsters of the 1930s–1950s formed one of the earliest prototypes of “cinematic universes,” featuring numerous crossover films. However, attempts to revive what Universal has dubbed the “Dark Universe” have proven unsuccessful: the best version of the concept is the 1987 cult classic, a bit dated but still charming, The Monster Squad, which pitted a team of Universal monsters led by Dracula against a gang of teenagers obsessed with horror movies. It’s more of a B-movie comedy than the epic all-star crossover envisioned by Universal in more recent times, but it’s the only successful experiment of its kind in the last 40 years or so.
The last time Universal tried to develop a modern version of the Dark Universe, the result was the 2017 reboot of The Mummy starring Tom Cruise, which was such a massive box office flop that it sank what had been planned as a film saga that would culminate in an Avengers-style crossover. We’ll have to wait and see if Kevin Williams’ project manages to hit the mark… In the meantime, Universal’s monsters will soon return in two modern versions distributed by Warner Bros: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, which reimagines the story of Frankenstein’s Bride, and Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, which promises a scarier-than-ever take on the classic Mummy story.
