MUMMY Reboot: Universal planning 'dark' franchise restart

[Aragorn]

I was gonna start a thread about The Mummy remake to kick off the Universal Monsters cinematic universe (after they decided not to include Dracula Untold as the starter), and found this thread, so....

Tom Cruise is the protagonist
Sofia Boutella is the mummy
Russell Crowe is... Dr. Jekyll

Also, Johnny Depp is doing The Invisible Man and it sounds like they're trying to get Angelina Jolie for Bride of Frankenstein.

 

[Skywalker]

I read that this new movie will be set in the present, which I understand but I also find it a little disappointing.

 

[Gaith]

Saints preserve us.

 

[JD]

I know the other versions of The Mummy were period stories, but is there really anything in the basic set up that requires it be in the past?

 

[Greg Cox]

Interesting trivia: Dr. Jekyll was not actually one of the original Universal Monsters. The classic 1932 and 1940 versions of Jekyll & Hyde were produced by Paramount, not Universal.

Still, the story has been public domain for years, so . . ...

 

[Christopher]

I know the other versions of The Mummy were period stories, but is there really anything in the basic set up that requires it be in the past?

Not really, aside from the ties to the Egyptology mania of the '20s and '30s when tombs were being discovered and people were dying from diseases that were sensationalized as "curses."

And really, I'm not sure the old horror stories work as well in a modern setting than a period one. I noted about the last of Universal's monsters, the Gill-Man in the '50s, that it was approached more as an exotic animal that was the province of science, rather than a malevolent supernatural force. The films seemed more modern in approach, products of a more scientifically-minded era. True, Frankenstein's Monster and the Invisible Man were products of science, but an earlier era's science that was as much alchemy as anything else, and thus had a more eerie, mysterious feel to it.

 

[Greg Cox]

Exactly. FRANKENSTEIN loses a lot of its shock value in an era where organ transplants and shocking dead people back to life are a routine part of modern medicine. And THE MUMMY is very much rooted in a bygone era where intrepid archaeologists braved curses to uncover the lost tombs of the pharaohs. Heck, even THE CREATURE assumes that there are still remote lagoons in the Amazon unexplored by modern science . . . .

 

[Christopher]

Heck, even THE CREATURE assumes that there are still remote lagoons in the Amazon unexplored by modern science . . . .

Well, there still are some, even today, I believe. Although the original film makes an entirely false assumption that the Amazon rainforest has been untouched since the Devonian era, when in fact it was probably a largely cultivated environment created by indigenous peoples over thousands of years. Since the area was too rainy for conventional agriculture (the soil would've been washed away), the peoples of the Amazon Basin instead developed advanced arboriculture, breeding trees and forest-floor plants to provide nutritional and medicinal benefits, hence the remarkable lushness and utility of rainforest plants.

 

[Gaith]

I know the other versions of The Mummy were period stories, but is there really anything in the basic set up that requires it be in the past?

Of course not, but don't we already have enough high-tech action franchises full of impossible holograms and drones and such? Every technological advance both opens up and constricts storytelling possibilities. (Romeo and Juliet wouldn't have had to off themselves had the latter been able to text the former about Friar John's plan, would they?)

Granted, in the case of The Mummy, we've recently had three period-piece movies (assuming 1999 still counts as "recently"), so a fresh approach might pay off for that one flick. But for everything there is a cost...

 

[Christopher]

(Romeo and Juliet wouldn't have had to off themselves had the latter been able to text the former about Friar John's plan, would they?)

Fie! This signal dead zone doth leave me
Bereft of bars as of my Romeo!
O, curse the day I joined AT&T,
When sweet Verizon ne'er deprived me so!

(Actually I'm on AT&T myself, haven't had any major problems with it, and can't speak to other cell plans' relative reliability, but it fit the rhyme and meter.)

 

[JD]

 

[Kemaiku]

When was Dracula Untold removed as the CU starter?

What about Caligula's dark master, the Vampire Alpha, and this supposed underlying 'game' they had all been dragged into?

Ugh, thought we were going to get a legion of master monsters with the Van Helsing reboot starting to bring that together in 2019.

 

[Christopher]

When was Dracula Untold removed as the CU starter?

Was it? Wikipedia still counts it as part of the continuity, although it wasn't originally intended to be and had reshoots to make it work as a prologue. Although the director said it was "optional" if the studio wanted to use the film as a "launching pad."

 

[Kemaiku]

Someone up thread said The Mummy is now the first one, I was responding to them.

 

[Skywalker]

Yeah, there's certainly nothing that requires these movies to be set in the '20s or '30s, it's just a personal preference.

 

[Greg Cox]

It's funny. The original movies were not actually period pieces, but kinda vague and imprecise about when exactly they were set, especially the ones set in some sort foggy, moonlit generic Eastern Europe in which, oddly, World War II doesn't seem to be an issue.

If you do the math, the various MUMMY sequels take place over the course of decades ("twenty years ago, your father uncovered an ancient tomb"), and yet it always seems to be the 1940s.

 

[Christopher]

Someone up thread said The Mummy is now the first one, I was responding to them.

Well, essentially it is. Dracula Untold was shot as a separate film and then retroactively reworked to function as a sort of prologue to the shared universe they hadn't quite established yet. So The Mummy is the first film that's actually been planned as part of the Universal Monsters shared universe to begin with, so it is the beginning from a creative standpoint, even if the Dracula movie is still retroactively considered part of the continuity.

If you do the math, the various MUMMY sequels take place over the course of decades ("twenty years ago, your father uncovered an ancient tomb"), and yet it always seems to be the 1940s.

Sort of the reverse of the Marvel sliding timescale, where the characters barely age even though the time frame keeps pace with the present. Or Diane Duane's Young Wizards series, where the adolescent characters aged maybe two years while the computer technology they worked with advanced 20 years' worth to keep pace with reality. (She actually rewrote the first four books a while back to modernize them in some ways, so I gather.)

 

[ancient]

Interesting trivia: Dr. Jekyll was not actually one of the original Universal Monsters. The classic 1932 and 1940 versions of Jekyll & Hyde were produced by Paramount, not Universal.

Still, the story has been public domain for years, so . . ...

I'm one of those annoying purists that hates any version of Hyde that resembles the HULK. He's just a little sex pervert, he doesn't have super powers!

 

[Christopher]

I'm one of those annoying purists that hates any version of Hyde that resembles the HULK. He's just a little sex pervert, he doesn't have super powers!

Heck, the Spencer Tracy version isn't even a "sex pervert." He's just a bushy-eyebrowed guy who sort of resembles Burgess Meredith as the Penguin and whose transgressions are never made any clearer than just being generally uncouth and rude toward his girlfriend. The Hays Code forced them to censor the sexually-themed plot of the previous movie so heavily that the sense of menace is completely lost. I don't know why they didn't just tell the story differently, since the original book was very unlike the Fredric March film. Given the censorship on sexual themes, they could've just changed it so Hyde was a criminal and killer, rather than someone who was vaguely, implicitly maybe sort of abusing Ingrid Bergman offscreen if you read between the lines.

The Mr. Hyde in Steven Moffat's Jekyll had superpowers to a degree -- heightened senses and augmented strength and speed. And I think the original portrayal of Hyde as a superstrong giant monster traces back, not to the Hulk or to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but to Friz Freleng's trio of "Jekyll and Hyde" cartoons, Dr. Jerkyl's Hide in 1954, Hyde and Hare in 1955, and Hyde and Go Tweet in 1960.

 

[Greg Cox]

There's also tendency, as early as the 1932 movie, to portray Hyde in simian terms. He's not a super-strong Hulk yet, but he may clamber around on rooftops and be as menacing as enraged gorilla.

See, for instance, ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE, which, as it happens, marks Hyde's sole appearance in one of the original Universal movies.