Is Universal’s Monster Shared Cinematic Universe Officially Dead?

The answer is yes. More or less. The original vision of what this "Dark Universe" was going to be is most certainly dead and if it does indeed come back in some form, it won't be anything like originally envisioned when that picture up there was poorly photoshopped. Honestly, it looks like they may have even just used Russell Crowe's Madame Tussaud dummy for that one. Yeesh.

The Hollywood Reporter released a fairly in-depth look at the current state of Universal's Dark Universe experiment and what they found is that there's no foundation there on which to build. This whole thing was the brain child of hack writer and director Alex Kurtzman whose Mummy only made $400 million worldwide on a budget of well over $125 million. That abysmal experiment wasn't really a Mummy movie. It felt like set-up for fifteen movies to come, with a studio once again putting the cart before the horse. Not even Tom Cruise's star power could illuminate that thing as anything but the turd it was.

The next film in the series was supposed to The Bride of Frankenstein—because you want to start things off on the right foot by rebooting a sequel—directed by Bill Condon. That was damned to development hell late in the summer when the bean counters decided that The Mummy wasn't going to be the cash windfall everyone expected. This also puts Johnny Depp's Invisible Man remake in limbo.

For his part, Kurtzman packed his bags and decided to go back to tainting Star Trek with his unique brand of hackery, leaving Universal scrambling to get things together. For now, it looks like the whole thing is dead, but you never know. Maybe if they start by making decent movies, then people might want to see all of them team up to fight, I don't know, Godzilla maybe. Who cares? Just focus on making movies people want to see rather than forcing them to watch a bunch of trash to get to the stuff they might actually have a desire to see.