Universal Pictures’ failed Dark Universe had the potential to bring some of their most iconic movie monsters into the modern day, but following the travesty of the Tom Cruise-led The Mummy in 2017, all thoughts of a straight-up shared monster universe were dropped and the unexpected success of 2020’s reimagining of The Invisible Man has instead led to a line-up of similar stand-alone outings for the horror icons of the 1930s and 1940s.
However, by the time plans for the Dark Universe were scrapped, one movie that had already started to take shape was the remake of The Bride of Frankenstein, James Whale’s 1935 follow-up to his 1931 classic Frankenstein, and screenwriter David Koepp has been sharing some of the details.
Koepp, who has worked on some of the biggest movie blockbusters such as Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible and Spider-Man (2002), recently told Collider that there were actually two versions of the movie being considered at various points, one of which would have seen the monster in a historical setting and being transported to present day. He explained:
"I did a couple different versions. That one was a dramatic history. It was gearing up, it was gonna be a great big movie. Bill Condon was gonna direct it and then The Mummy detonated and that all fell apart. Then I did a much smaller version and I thought that was interesting, but that didn’t quite work out. I think someone else is taking a try now.
So, I don't know. I felt like Bride of Frankenstein is a treasure obviously and it doesn’t belong to me. And I got two really good cracks at it, so definitely fair to let someone else have a try. So I don’t know what will work out with that...It was going to be a very big lavish, beautiful, gothic horror production. And one idea I liked was the first thirty or forty pages took place in the 1870s as the Frankenstein movies do and then she became sort of inert for 150 years and was rediscovered and reawakened in the present day. And I thought that was cool."
The Bride of Frankenstein Will Likely Happen, but No Longer Seems a Priority
As late as 2020, Koepp was still reworking a Bride of Frankenstein script and at the time the writer claimed that the studio was actively looking for a director. Since then though the film seems to have been put on the back burner, with current Universal Monsters focus being on the remake of The Wolfman with Ryan Gosling, and the now-filming Renfield, which stars Nicolas Cage as Dracula.
Although it is likely we will never see the exact movie that would have formed part of the Dark Universe, the run of reimagined stories featuring variations of the classic movie monsters of Universal’s past seem to be striking a chord that The Mummy completely missed. With Frankenstein’s Monster being one of the biggest icons of that collection of creatures, and The Bride of Frankenstein being equally iconic, it could only be a matter of time before something moves forward on in some way to bring them back to big screen in a new way.