Universal Cements Plans To Make New Monster Movies Worthless Fucking Garbage

I'm not mad. 

I know the headline makes it seem like I'm mad, but I'm really just resigned. I knew that reviving the Universal Monsters in the 21st century would be a tricky thing, and that bringing in Alex Kurtzman to be the guy behind it would really screw stuff up. But mostly I understood that in the modern world studios don't make tentpole horror franchises anymore, all the horror movies are generally pretty cheaply made (and thus incredibly profitable). The big money, the big franchises, are all action movies. 

So why would the Monsters be any different? 

Now it's official: Universal's vision for their iconic characters is to have them no longer be horror characters. They're all action stars! Says Donna Langley, after wiping her mouth of the spittle which she just let fly into the face of everyone who loves the Universal Monsters:

“We don’t have any capes [in our film library]. But what we do have is an incredible legacy and history with the monster characters. We’ve tried over the years to make monster movies — unsuccessfully, actually. So, we took a good, hard look at it, and we settled upon an idea, which is to take it out of the horror genre, put it more in the action-adventure genre and make it present day, bringing these incredibly rich and complex characters into present day and reimagine them and reintroduce them to a contemporary audience.”

Basically this is "How can we fit our round peg into this square hole and make money doing so?" thinking. 

The funny thing is that the Universal Monsters aren't that far off from superheroes, and many of the best superheroes are based - loosely or otherwise - on these characters. Ben Grimm, the Hulk, even Spider-Man have their roots in stories of tragic figures made into beasts against their will. But the difference is that a superhero story turns these qualities into assets, while the monster movie always sees them as a handicap. Larry Talbot doesn't use his newfound wolf powers to fight crime, he simply can't stop himself from killing motherfuckers. 

That's a key thing to understand, and Universal does not seem to understand it. Did I expect these movies to be just somber, 70 minute long productions like the originals? No, of course not. I expected chase scenes and jump scares and all that shit to happen along the way. But all of a sudden it seems like Universal saw I, Frankenstein and thought "Oh, that was hot."

What's weird is that this is the exact same thinking that got us Van Helsing, an action-adventure take on the Universal Monsters. I'm sure this won't fail miserably yet again.