Is the cinematic universe concept really that new? Alex Kurtzman, director of the forthcoming Tom Cruise-led remake of The Mummy, pointed out recently that Universal Pictures were making mashup monster movies more than half a century ago. Roy William Neill’s film Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, featuring Bela Lugosi as Frankenstein’s Monster and Lon Chaney Jr reprising his role as the cursed lycanthrope, kicked off the concept in 1943. Further ensemble efforts House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945) even added the vampire count to the mix.
The problem is that none of these movies is remembered as a high point of Universal’s horror output, which probably peaked more than a decade earlier with James Whale’s masterful 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein. Critics complained that Lugosi, who was suffering from exhaustion linked to his age (60) and, most likely, addiction to painkillers, was only in Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman for 10 minutes. Successive films verged so far into surreal comedy that the studio’s next monster mashup, 1948’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, dropped all pretence at chills and cheerfully transitioned to farcical knockabout silliness with the popular comedy duo.
Universal could easily go the same route with its 21st-century revival, except that the result might be closer to Adam Sandler’s lightweight animation Hotel Transylvania than a monster-movie take on the Marvel cinematic universe, which is clearly what the studio is hoping for. A recent trailer for The Mummy revealed that Universal has set up its own version of Marvel’s Shield, the CIA-like agency that keeps the world’s superheroes in line in the Avengers movies. It’s called Prodigium, and is led by Russell Crowe’s Henry Jekyll, no longer a scientist plagued by his chemically spawned evil alter ego, Dr Hyde, but more of a Nick Fury type. This brave new world of “gods and monsters” will eventually include new takes on The Invisible Man, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Wolf Man and the vampire hunter Van Helsing.
Warner Bros’ DC Extended Universe is ploughing a similar furrow, having introduced a sinister, unnamed government agency run by Viola Davis’s Amanda Waller in Suicide Squad. Like Shield, its job is to keep an eye on all the “metahumans” popping up around the world; unlike Fury’s agency, it took no time at all to show its rotten roots, which certainly must make life hard for screenwriters attempting a multiple-movie narrative arc.
Michael Bay’s Transformers is also trying to brand itself as a cinematic universe. In practice, this could mean spinoff movies for Autobot Bumblebee, currently pitched for 2018, and a mooted GI Joe meets the Transformers crossover flick. If the definition of a cinematic universe is a series of movies with a common theme that has become popular enough to keep audiences coming back for more, even when the saga continues to introduce new characters and storylines, then this just about fits the template. But given how execrable Bay’s last few efforts have been, it’s hard to see Transformers hitting Marvel levels of acclaim.
Which brings us to Star Wars. Gareth Edwards’s Rogue One is due to hit cinemas this week, and all of a sudden has a little bit of buzz around it. A movie that appeared to be floundering under the weight of bad publicity over reshoots and Disney’s decision to parachute in Bourne supremo Tony Gilroy to oversee the final cut has been given the thumbs-up by Kevin Smith and Rainn Wilson, who attended the world premiere in Los Angeles on 10 December.
Rogue One’s success could be vital for those hoping that the cinematic universe model is the answer to Hollywood’s ongoing creative dilemma: the commercial imperative to keep giving audiences what they want, but the avoidance of endless sequels and remakes. That is, to keep the creativity flowing while staying on top of the numbers game. Moreover, it shows that the template can work without a Marvel-style central agency to glue everything together.
Last year’s The Force Awakens, with its focus on the re-emergence of the all-encompassing mystical energy field, gave Disney and Lucasfilm ample opportunity to set up its own Shield-like taskforce. But story planners instead chose to fill in the gaps in the history we already know, by telling the backstory to the Empire’s construction of the first Death Star in 1977’s Star Wars, and how the Rebel Alliance got hold of the plans to destroy it.
Rogue One always seemed like a leftfield creative move for the first Star Wars spinoff, if not necessarily a daring one. But its very unorthodoxy – an absence of lightsabers, Jedi-Sith battles and “chosen one” types that audiences expect to see – might prove to be its greatest triumph.
Disney’s problem now is that it fears repeating the failures of the prequel trilogy, which shifted the heart of Star Wars from knockabout space adventure to turgid bureaucratic battles in the Galactic senate. But it did – as George Lucas has repeatedly said – at least venture into new territory. If Rogue One succeeds where its predecessors failed, it should give the studio the confidence to begin taking risks on entirely new stories and characters within the wider galaxy, just as the decanonised extended universe did across scores of novels, comic books and games for almost three decades following Star Wars’ debut in cinemas. Suddenly we might not need that Boba Fett movie after all.
