But no Hugh Jackman …..so far!
[dropcap size=small]S[/dropcap]creenwriter John Spaihts recently sat down for an interview with Collider to talk about his upcoming project, the reboot of Van Helsing for the Universal Monster Cinematic Universe.
Spaihts dropped some really crucial information about the upcoming project, including that it will be taking place in present day.
It’s a new creation, so it doesn’t owe much of a debt to prior films, but it is still a very romantic departure from the character as incepted in Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, where it was a Dutch doctor who figures out a very surprising answer to an odd medical question. This is a monster hunter with encyclopedic knowledge, but it’s set in the present day and it’s just filled with good stuff I’m not allowed to talk about. But I’m very excited about this new incarnation of Van Helsing, and I hope that as the Universal Monsters Cinematic Universe begins to take flight, we’ll see him cropping up in other stories, as well.
This is pretty exciting to hear that Van Helsing can team up Frankenstein, the Wolfman, and Dracula to take down bigger and badder monsters. Spaihts also said that he wants to make the movies “legit-terrifying” while also being modern epic action movies. Spaihts also wrote the script for the upcoming Mummy movie.
Spaihts’ co-writer for Van Helsing, Eric Heisserer, also echoed Spaihts’ idea for the tone of the films in an interview earlier this year.
I can say that the decision that a lot of us made was to go and just write the best movie we could in our own corner and make sure it’s good on its own…and didn’t necessarily need to link arm-in arm-with anybody else. And to be tonally different from the other films. One may be a little bit more comedic, action-adventure-y, one can be very much a traditional horror piece. That kind of thing. And then we’ll see what happens as the projects evolve and we all get a chance to convene and talk, and make sure the movies feel like they’re all in the same world.
While it may be under the radar this new cinematic universe has a lot of potential. Spaihts and Heisserer have a plan and they seem to be really excited about creating a new and exciting movie series for fans of the monster movie genre. Hopefully all goes well for them so that we can see their vision the way they want to present it.
There is no release date yet for Van Helsing. The Mummy, the first film in the Universal Cinematic Universe, is scheduled to release in theaters on June 9, 2017.
