The rebooted Universal Monsters world is set to officially kick off with the release of The Mummy remake in 2017, but planning on the films has been underway for quite awhile, and recently at the Television Critics Association Press Tour, filmmaker Alex Kurtzman touched on how there will be plenty of horror in the upcoming monster movies, which were previously coined as "action-adventures."

Kurtzman, the co-leader of Universal's Monsters reboot initiative along with Chris Morgan, gave Collider an update on the fright films:

"We have actually started doing a lot of design work, we’re getting scripts in, everything is feeling really really good, so I don’t want to curse it by saying too much to you, but it’s going well."

Kurtzman insisted that these Universal Monster movies will be horror films, including The Mummy reboot that he will direct:

"...I think there was some lost in translation quality to the way it was received, because I promise you there will be horror in these movies. It is our life goal to make a horror movie. The tricky part is actually how you combine horror with either adventure or suspense or action and be true to all the genres together."

Kurtzman also touched on the overall plan behind these interconnected reboots and the process of bringing Noah Hawley, Aaron Guzikowski, and Ed Solomon on board to help create the shared universe:

"Chris Morgan is my partner in this and we all picked people that we’ve worked with before, people that we really liked, people whose work we admired, people that we didn’t know, and really thought long and hard about which writers felt right for each monster. So our goal is to have each movie retain the identity and the individuality of the specific monster, but you’ll see how they start to fit into a larger universe as the movies unravel."

The Universal Monsters reboot universe will debut when The Mummy remake hits theaters March 24th, 2017. Other projects in development include remakes of Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Wolf Man, with other antagonists like Dracula, The Phantom of the Opera, and Frankenstein's monster expected to get some screen time, too. Stay tuned to Daily Dead for further updates.

Source: Collider
  • Derek Anderson
    About the Author - Derek Anderson

    Raised on a steady diet of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books and Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Derek has been fascinated with fear since he first saw ForeverWare being used on an episode of Eerie, Indiana.

    When he’s not writing about horror as the Senior News Reporter for Daily Dead, Derek can be found daydreaming about the Santa Carla Boardwalk from The Lost Boys or reading Stephen King and Brian Keene novels.