Hear Me Out: The Mummy's Monsterverse Could Be Great

Friends! Frankensteins! Gill-Men! Lend me your ears. (Actually, no, keep them attached.) I come here not to praise The Mummy but to re-bury it.

Tom Cruise remains a movie star no matter what kind of nonsense tries to bring him down. If he can survive that thing with the couch, he can survive anything. But the failure-to-launch of The Mummy would jeopardize more than careers and studio marketing budgets. The movie is supposed to start up the Dark Universe, Universal Studios’ multi-movie franchise starring its monsters of yore. But I'm telling you: No matter what happens with The Mummy, this thing could still work.

It's not going to be easy. Front-and-centering murderous creatures as your protagonists means that for them to win (and, presumably, carry forward into sequels and side-quels), they kind of have to kill all the heroic people trying to defeat them. In fact that might be one of the key things that distinguishes a horror movie from a science fiction movie. Alien is a horror movie where you root for the xenomorph; Aliens is a science fiction movie where you cheer for the Marines. Which makes assembling an Avengers-style team of horrifying monsters bent on the destruction of the human race a tough sell. What do the monsters actually do in that movie? Who do you hope will win?

Difficult, yes, but not an impossible mission. Great crossover universes didn’t start with Marvel and Star Wars—they started with monsters, specifically the creatures of 19th century literature that Universal Studios turned into early horror. After one-off turns in the 1930s, Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolfman met in 1941. In the early 1970s, the underappreciated science fiction writer Philip José Farmer created the Wold Newton canon, which linked some of the great pulp heroes (and villains) of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—principally Tarzan and Doc Savage.

In these early examples you get the thrill of the team-up without “franchise fatigue,” because the idea was still new. But you also get the two qualities that mark the best monsterverses: a sly sideways-ness to who the monsters are and what they want, and a strong theory for who opposes them and why.

Take, for example, a classic of the form: The Monster Squad, a 1987 movie co-written by Iron Man 3 director Shane Black and directed by Fred Dekkard. The tricksy, fun bit here is that it’s a bunch of kids who figure out Dracula is planning to take over the world, using the Mummy, Gill-man, and Wolfman as henchmonsters. The kids’ natural skills (read: being fanboys and -girls with dirtbikes) turn out to be the only thing that can defeat evil. You know Stranger Things? Yeah, that.

The early 2000s saw perhaps the best monster crossover, the comic book series The League of Extrarodinary Gentlemen, written by Alan Moore (yes, Watchmen Alan Moore) and with art by Kevin O’Neill. The book owes a lot to Wold Newton in that it relies, initially, on Victorian pulp and horror, but Moore’s unparalleled mastery of pop-culture arcana (and maybe also real arcana) eventually pulls in every literary and pulp character and scenario from the late 1800s through 2009. The fun comes in figuring who the good guys and bad guys are. Everyone gets at least a cameo, from Nemo to Fu Manchu to Dr. Moreau. The characters act exactly the way you’d remember them from the books, if you remembered the books—that’s the clever part. The secret society fighting to save the world (that’s the League) ties it all together.

Running almost contemporaneously with League was Warren Ellis’ Planetary (with art from John Cassaday). The title refers to another secret organization, this time one that catalogues and sometimes fights close analogues to famous pop-culture icons. That move lets Ellis—like Moore, a British writer who knows everything about pulp—run through genres from kaiju to cowboy. By not making his side characters explicitly Tarzan, let’s say, Ellis can also wrap in Ka-Zar and other jungle adventurers. Ellis' giant insects are every radioactive 1950s mutant instead of just Them! The key, again, is the team of investigators who we readers can follow as they travel among the monsters.

You can see the possibilities in what the Dark Universe might do in the glorious Showtime series Penny Dreadful, run by John Logan. Lots of the Victorian monsters show up. Dorian Grey (and portrait) and Dr. Frankenstein (and monster) are all main characters, but the leads are Eva Green and Timothy Dalton as the close friend and father of Mina Murray, one of Dracula’s early victims and (meta-crossover!) the lead in Moore’s League. Even if Penny Dreadful hadn’t been one of the most sumptuous TV shows ever, and even if Green wasn’t spectacular as—well, a possessed witch engaged to the Devil … I think—the show still would have been great, because it focused on all the different ways really damaged people and not-quite-people can love each other (while hunting demons). Penny Dreadful was an idiosyncratic distillation of every reason people want to hear stories about monsters instead of heroes, and it proves that a Dark Universe could be a place people would want to visit.

That remains true even if The Mummy ain’t that. Nothing structural prevents a monsterverse from working. In the other cinematic universes the real key is where filmmakers spend their money. Disney has been practically abstemious in its spending on talent, both in front of and behind the Lucasfilm and Marvel cameras. These movies are much happier grabbing non-premium directors—still talented, just not platinum-plated—and let’s charitably call them up-and-coming actors. A certain B-movie sensibility is welcome, as long as the writers are pushing askew angles.

Universal seems to be making a different choice. The Mummy introduces viewers to Dr. Jekyll, played by Russell Crowe. Meanwhile, Javier Bardem is set to play Frankenstein’s Monster, and Johnny Depp on deck to play the Invisible Man. But I’m not sure anyone goes to monster movies to see movie stars. They go to be scared—and to root for the bad guys.