Warner Bros. saw the success that Disney had with the Marvel shared universe and looked like they might be willing to try the same thing with DC Comics. Disney even saw how big it was and wants to strike gold again with a Star Wars shared universe. Those both make sense. Universal wants in on the act and wants to create a shared universe of the classic Universal monsters.
Been there, done that.
Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, two screenwriters who know how to script movies that make $100 million while pissing off fanboys everywhere, are behind the effort.
There’s an interesting thing that could happen at Universal where they have this amazing library of their old monsters and these kinds of heroes, and the idea of trying to create a universe. [We’re doing] Van Helsing, and we’re also producing The Mummy for them. We’re kind of imagining updating these kinds of things. You don’t want to just make remakes when you’re doing a thing, unless it’s worthy of being a remake, but when you have an idea for something that can actually be made different and yet be true to what it was. We just had a notion of how to make it modern and have a slightly different tone. It’s not going to be just a remake.
Sure, putting the Universal monsters in the same universe could be interesting, but for young movie fans, it might seem a bit cheesy, and for people who actually know movies, it was done before.
After Universal created Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man and the Wolf Man, they soon started mixing and matching them. House of Dracula and House of Frankenstein saw the three big monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolf Man) all meet. Things seemed to be just cash grabs after that until Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein ended the entire Universal Monster movies universe.
Orci said he wants to create something different, yet seems to be creating something that was already done before.
Source: IGN