The Invisible Man’ Hits the Reset Button on Universal’s Classic Monster Movies

You may recall, a few years ago, tales of a movie called The Mummy. No, not The Mummy with Brendan Fraser, the other Mummy, from 2017. The one starring Tom Cruise? And Sofia Boutella? And an undead Jake Johnson, for some reason? You remember, right? You don’t? Well, that’s fine, because it was terrible: an embarrassingly bad cash-grab from a company needlessly trying to make a Marvel Cinematic Universe out of whatever they had available, focusing on all the wrong parts of what made their classic horror properties great in the first place.
 
With The Mummy, Universal Pictures launched and, at the same time, annihilated what they had planned to call the Dark Universe, a series of films centered around the studio’s classic monster properties, from Dracula to Frankenstein to the Creature from the Black Lagoon, that would all be intricately tied together — like what Marvel is doing with its comic book superheroes and what Warner Bros. is attempting with Kong: Skull Island and its Godzilla movies. The Mummy absolutely tanked, was a critical failure, and the studios’ other upcoming properties, including its Bride of Frankenstein and Wolf Man movies, were put on hold. Given all of that, you may be wondering if Leigh Whannell’s new horror film The Invisible Man, which is a Universal movie based on a monster character from a classic book, is in any way related to the Dark Universe mess. 

Is The Invisible Man a sequel to The Mummy?

No, thank god! Which is great news for everyone involved. There was actually an Invisible Man Dark Universe movie in the planning stage before The Mummy came out — it would have starred Johnny Depp as H.G. Wells’ villain in a modern setting, and would have probably in some way involved Tom Cruise’s Mummy character Nick Morton and Russell Crowe’s Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, the leader of the monster-hunting organization that was supposed to act as the throughline for all of these movies. But, given Depp’s various legal troubles and the doomed state of the cinematic universe in general, we’ll never see that version. Instead, this Invisible Man is completely disconnected from anything else, entirely it’s own thing, which is, of course, one reason why it’s so great. I can’t imagine having to sit there and watch Russell Crowe and Elisabeth Moss say the word “Prodigium” to each other.