Oh, hopes were once so high for “Dracula Untold,” that vampire movie you forgot that was released in 2014 starring Luke Evans. As the movie was gearing up to hit theaters, it was announced that Universal would be embarking on a monster movie universe, and at first, the plan was to include “Dracula Untold.”
“I was really excited to be part of that [world]. When we started out we weren’t [part of the series], but then we found out that they were going to do it,” the film’s producer Alissa Phillips said mere days before it was released. “Working with Alex Kurtzman and Chris Morgan, who are very much a part of creating ‘The Mummy’ and the other ones… it’s been fun to be a part of that.”
Well, the movie came out, was trashed by critics, and flopped domestically with $56 million (though it did fairly decently abroad tallying $160 million) and we all politely forgot the movie happened. And indeed, Universal and everyone else is going to forget it happened too. When asked by Collider if “Dracula Untold” will be part of the canon of this new movie universe, Alex Kurtzman, “The Mummy” director and screenwriter for the brewing series of flicks had a very simple answer: “No.”
Sorry, Luke Evans.
As for what lays ahead with “The Mummy” and beyond, Kurtzman promises they’re going to bring together all the monsters “organically,” and the universe only works if the individual films can stand strong on their own.
“The thing people forget is that the Universal Monsters were the first mash-up; they were the first universe built. It started with, I think, ‘Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man,’ and that was the first time that they put them together and then from there they started cross-pollinating all the monsters. But that was only because ‘Frankenstein’ had succeeded so many times as a film, and had spawned its own sequels, and ‘Wolf Man’ had done the same, that Universal was at a point where they said, ‘God, we don’t know what to do with these characters anymore. Why don’t we put them together?’ and then new stories emerged,” Kurtzman said.
“So I can’t tell you how much I believe that in order for you to enjoy ‘The Mummy,’ you have to have a satisfying mummy experience. If we are then in that context able to set up a larger world? Great! But the setup of that larger world and whatever characters Tom [Cruise] may meet over the course of the mummy movie have to be part of the mummy movie. It cannot take you out of that,” he added.
“The Mummy” opens on June 9, 2017. Check out a new featurette below.