Wolf Man is the next instalment in arguably the oldest franchise in cinema history. Universal Monsters, which evolved through the silent era, features iconic characters like Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy and, of course, the Wolf Man.
Based on the 1941 film starring Lon Chaney Jr, this new remake comes from production company Blumhouse and director Leigh Whannell, who have previously partnered on another Universal Monster revival, The Invisible Man in 2020.
Despite being released during the pandemic, The Invisible Man was a critical and commercial success, making over US$140 million (£115m) worldwide on a shoestring budget of US$7 million. Wolf Man, with the same production company, director and low budget, looks to follow The Invisible Man’s footsteps. It promises to be a contemporary, stripped-back retelling of one of Universal’s most iconic characters.
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The Universal Monster movies have not always been considered a franchise. In his book Media Franchising (2013), cultural studies scholar Derek Johnson suggests that, despite “monster concepts [being] multiplied and exchanged across a number of film productions” in the 1930s and beyond, the idea of a film franchise was not apparent in Hollywood at the time. The language of franchising was not deployed even in retail industries until 1959.
Yet by 2017 – a year when eight of the top-10 films were franchise instalments – Universal not only envisaged its stable of monsters as a major potential franchise, but seemed to see the most successful movie franchise of the 21st century, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), as an ideal template.
The Dark Universe franchise
On May 22 2017, Universal unveiled the Dark Universe franchise, which was intended to see many of Universal’s classic monsters return to the big screen. The announcement included a new logo and theme that would play before each film. A-listers such as Tom Cruise, Russell Crowe and Johnny Depp were all signed on to star in future instalments.
The franchise launched in June 2017 with the release of big-budget reboot The Mummy, starring Cruise. But the film’s disastrous box office put paid to the entire endeavour, with no other films released under the Dark Universe banner.
While a postmortem of the Dark Universe would reveal many different causes of its rapid death, a particularly relevant one is the attempt to replicate a prized asset of the MCU: the focus on character continuity and crossovers.
In his book The Comic Book Film Adaptation: Exploring Modern Hollywood’s Leading Genre (2016), media researcher Liam Burke noted that comic book movie franchises in the mid-2000s had started to emulate their source material – specifically, the comic book crossover “where characters from different books would appear together … a proven method for generating comic book sales”.
Identifying the MCU as the zenith of this strategy, Burke said the key to its success had been “a concerted effort to establish continuity between the various films”. A notable example of this is the character of Nick Fury, played by Samuel L Jackson. Fury is head of the fictional extra-governmental agency Shield, and appears throughout MCU films and television series.
The Dark Universe looked to lift this concept wholesale. The announcement of the franchise explained that it would centre on “Jekyll’s mysterious multi-national org Prodigium that connects all titles in the Dark Universe”. Dr Jekyll (played by Crowe) does appear in The Mummy. But while this character crossover approach has paid dividends in the MCU, Universal’s approach lacked the same novelty.
In my view, this is largely because the Universal monsters had already crossed over and interacted since the 1940s in films such as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) and House of Dracula (1945). In the 1950s, comedies such as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) became commonplace when individual monster films had stopped making such an impact at the box office.
A new strategy dawns
These crossover films, as enjoyable as many of them are, often indicated the end or culmination of a cycle of monster films, as opposed to the dawn of a new cinematic universe. As such, Universal’s current strategy – to produce low-budget remakes of the original standalone monster films – seems like a savvy course-correction after the collapse of the Dark Universe.
In fact, the Universal group’s hopes of a shared universe of monsters are still very much alive. In June last year, it released a video detailing a brand-new land in Epic Universe, its upcoming theme park in Orlando, Florida. The video shows an area of the park entirely given over to rides, cafes, bars and shops all themed around the Universal Monsters. The land’s name? Dark Universe.
Within this land, prominently featured with the other monsters, is the Wolf Man, who headlines his own spinning roller-coaster “Curse of the Werewolf”. With these varying strategies in place to manage its menagerie of monsters, it is clear Universal sees this franchise as a crucial part of its brand identity.
It will hope that Whannell’s Wolf Man continues this momentum, rather than becoming another cursed entry in this storied franchise.
Kieran Foster does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
