Nicolas Cage as Dracula in Renfield

Of course there turned out to be no forward for The Mummy or the Dark Universe. In spite, of the studio getting its cast of monsters together for a group portrait and hiring Danny Elfman to write a jingle for the swanky “Dark Universe” title card, the movie’s immediate failure at the box office—where it opened at $31.7 million on a $125 million budget—left the Dark Universe dead on arrival.

Universal and the filmmakers behind this weekend’s Renfield have been far cagier about whether the film is explicitly setting up a Universal Monsters shared universe or even a sequel, but anyone who watched the movie knows it deliberately left the door open for Cage’s Dracula to return. And when writer and producer Robert Kirkman spoke with Den of Geek about a future beyond Renfield, he noted the movie was standalone. However, he also acknowledged, “The Universal Monsters are a cool world to be exploring and playing in, and there’s definitely a lot of potential for other stuff there.”

Whatever that “other stuff” in the Universal Monsters world might be, it seems likely it would have continued Renfield’s attempt to turn a horror legacy into a backdoor superhero/monster mashup. But given Renfield’s debut, the exact details of that may never be filled out.

Two More Universal Draculas Offer a Better, Bloodier Future

And yet, there remains one other irony to this, too, which is that in the years between The Mummy and Renfield, the studio did have a major success in resurrecting another Universal Monster. In the precious few months before COVID shut down movie theaters in 2020, director Leigh Whannell and Blumhouse Productions’ The Invisible Man remake was one of the last healthy box office hits of the pre-pandemic era. Opening in February 2020, the tense and at times genuinely scary The Invisible Man reimagining made a concept more than a hundred years old fresh for moviegoers and critics alike, earning an aggregate score of 92 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and $144 million at the global box office off a $7 million budget. Without the pandemic, that number likely would’ve been higher.

None of this is to say that Universal should look to keep all of its future monster movies in the micro-budgeted territory of a Blumhouse release. But it probably would be astute to keep costs south of $50 million and to stop resisting how these characters lend themselves so naturally to horror, or at least thrillers, as opposed to the modern Hollywood formula of interconnected action movies where the monstrous characters (or their sidekicks in the case of Renfield) keep turning into superheroes without capes.

To their credit, Universal also seems aware of this appetite in audiences. Indeed, the final irony of Renfield is that whether that film was a success or failure, its studio essentially has been building a Dracula movie multiverse (albeit blessedly without any interconnectivity). And it was an especially amusing maneuver that their second of three Dracula movies in the next 18 months began its marketing by putting the trailer for The Last Voyage of the Demeter in front of Renfield.

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