The box-office dud “The Mummy” sank Universal’s hopes for a grand franchise. But the studio is rebooting it on a smaller scale, starting with “The Invisible Man.”
In “The Invisible Man,” an update of the 1933 Universal classic, the director Leigh Whannell elicits pulse-quickening scares from shots of a random jogger, an empty room (or is it?), a guy slapping a car window, and a dog bowl. None of these elements were particularly costly to shoot, nor was the movie itself, which was filmed in Australia in 40 days at the relatively modest cost of $8 million. “It’s a low-budget film by Hollywood standards, and certainly by Universal standards,” Whannell said.
The filmmakers were able to keep costs down in part by keeping visual effects to a relative minimum. That’s a departure from the 1933 original, which boasted state-of-the-art spectacles (by the standards then), including the now-classic sequence of Claude Rains unwrapping the bandages from his face to reveal a cackling wraith. “If you think of the movie relative to tentpole movies, there are virtually no special effects,” said Jason Blum, whose Blumhouse Productions made the film.
Opening on Feb. 28, “The Invisible Man” marks the first time that Blumhouse, the horror empire behind “Get Out” and the “Paranormal Activity” series, has teamed up with Universal to create a movie based on one of the venerable studio’s classic monsters. The film is also the first installment in the latest reboot of that monster franchise, one that includes some of horror’s most beloved beasties, like Frankenstein and Dracula, the Wolf Man and the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
The move is a stark departure from the last time Universal tried rebooting its family of movie monsters, just three years ago. Back then, the studio came up with an idea for an interconnected, star-filled universe like the ones over at Marvel (think “The Avengers”) and DC (“Justice League”). Dubbed the Dark Universe, the franchise promised big stars (Johnny Depp, Javier Bardem) and lavish budgets. The pilot project was “The Mummy,” an effects-laden action film starring Tom Cruise that featured spectacles aplenty: a C-130 ripped apart midair by squadrons of crows, underwater zombie-on-Cruise action, armies of CGI spiders, all on a reported budget of $345 million. Russell Crowe made an appearance as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, foreshadowing the Universe-to-come. But when “The Mummy” only earned $80.2 million domestically, it took the Dark Universe down with it.
Wheeler Winston Dixon, a film studies professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and author of “A History of Horror,” wasn’t surprised the film performed poorly. “This is not Marvel,” he said. “These are horror movies. They’re stripped down, they deal with violent emotions and violent themes, and they’re designed to horrify, not inspire awe. And that takes economy.”
This time around, said Peter Cramer, president of Universal Pictures, the studio is focusing on individual filmmaker-driven projects over grand world-building schemes. “We said to the filmmakers, tell us what you’re connecting to with these characters,” he said. “We’re listening to any and all ideas, rather than trying to create a vast, interconnected universe.”
Universal also seems to be abandoning the mammoth budgets of monster movies past by having Blumhouse lead the charge on this reboot. The production company has made microbudgets, and the outsized profits they can generate, a point of pride. Its very first horror film, the 2009 “Paranormal Activity,” grossed $193.4 million and launched a lucrative franchise on a not-a-typo budget of $11,000. (The film cut costs by going without a camera crew, name actors or a script.) In 2017, “Get Out,” directed by Jordan Peele, garnered four Oscar nominations and grossed more than $250 million on a budget of $4.5 million. “I look at low budgets as a benefit,” Blum said. “That’s pretty much all we do.”
The stream of pitches to Universal has been both steady and eclectic, with ideas coming from filmmakers not ordinarily associated with the horror genre. “I wouldn’t say we issued an open invitation, but we certainly talked to filmmakers who we admire,” Cramer said. “And once we put the word out with a few producers, people started coming to us saying, hey, I’ve got this idea.”
In the works is “Dark Army,” directed by Paul Feig (“Bridesmaids”) and starring a mix of classic Universal monsters and new characters. “It’s hard to describe the tone of that one,” said Cramer.
Elizabeth Banks (“Pitch Perfect 2”) is slated to direct and star in “The Invisible Woman,” based on an original pitch she took to Universal. And Dexter Fletcher, coming off the success of the Elton John biopic “Rocketman,” will direct “Renfield,” based on a minor character in the Dracula legend, a spider-eating madman who doubles as the Count’s henchman. “He’s the guy who has to work for Dracula, which is the worst job ever,” said Cramer.
There are projects in the works based on nearly every classic Universal monster, Cramer said, including Frankenstein (“there’s a cool filmmaker involved, but it’s a little early to talk too much about that”) and Frankenstein’s bride.
For “The Invisible Man,” Whannell strayed far from the original source material, both H.G. Wells’s 1897 sci-fi novel and the Claude Rains classic. In that film, the Invisible Man is a chemist driven mad after ingesting a mystery substance called monocane in 1930s England; in Whannell’s take, he’s an abusive tech bro who finds a novel way to use his powers of invisibility to continue to terrorize his wife, played by Elisabeth Moss, after he presumably fakes his own suicide. “I didn’t want to make anything gothic or retro,” Whannell said.
What’s more, the Invisible Man is not the star of “The Invisible Man”; his wife is. Fittingly, we hardly ever see the guy (the British actor Oliver Jackson-Cohen), bandages or no. “The original depicted him as visible,” Whannell said. “One of the first things I thought was, what if you took away the hat, the coat, the glasses, the bandages, and actually made him invisible?”
Perhaps the biggest difference from the original is that Whannell’s version is true horror from start to finish. While the 1933 film has its spooky moments (in one scene, the Invisible Man derails a train, sending hundreds of passengers off a cliff), there is also a constantly shrieking landlady, a bumbling police inspector, a lovelorn fiancée, and comical sots. Much of the film’s charm comes from its visual magic (books floating in air! weird footprints in the snow!), not its scares.
The remake is a different prospect entirely. Whannell’s writing credits include the “Saw” and “Insidious” franchises, so the film is a proper Blumhouse horror flick, rated R for “strong bloody violence and language.”
“I wanted to put my foot on your throat and not take it off until the credits,” he said.
How this latest franchise reboot pans out remains to be seen, but given Hollywood’s craving for established intellectual property, Universal will probably continue to return to its classic monsters for years to come, whether through effects-filled spectacles or low-budget thrillers.
“These creatures are timeless,” said Prof. Dixon. “There will be films about Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, long after we’re gone. They’ll still be mining these things. But the ones that will be effective will be made by people who are sincerely invested in the material and treat these creatures with deadly seriousness.”
