A new incarnation of The Invisible Man was announced earlier this year from writer/director Leigh Whannell, news that immediately excited fans of the beloved Universal Monsters series of films. Jason Blum, who will be producing the film, recently confirmed that the project will be a far cry from the 2017 reboot of The Mummy, with this project featuring a lower budget and being driven by characters as opposed to spectacle.
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“It was like the Blumhouse version of The Invisible Man, it’s a lower-budget movie. It’s not dependent on special effects, CGI, stunts,” Blum shared with Collider. “It’s super character-driven, it’s really compelling, it’s thrilling, it’s edgy, it feels new. Those were all things that felt like they fit with what our company does. And it happened to be an Invisible Man story, so it checked both boxes. And we responded to it because I think Leigh is just an A+ director.”
The Dark Universe was announced in 2017 and was set to be a shared universe of reboots focusing on Universal’s roster of iconic horror characters. The first film in the series, The Mummy, was both a critical and financial disappointment, ultimately ending the series’ potential after the first installment.
The announcement of The Invisible Man immediately inspired theories that Blumhouse could be reviving various other abandoned Dark Universe projects and, while Blum isn’t ruling this out, he admitted he wants to focus on one project at a time.
“I don’t believe in saying ‘We’re going to do movies about this’ and then trying to find a movie about it,” the producer admitted. “So I didn’t believe in going and saying, ‘I want to do all these movies’, and then try to find directors to do them. We have a director whoโฆ we’ve also done six or seven movies with, pitched us this spectacular idea about Invisible Man. We told him to write it, he wrote it, then we took it to the studio and said, ‘We’d love to do this and this is what we would do with it,’ and they said yes.”
Blum also revealed that he has already received some pitches for other Universal Monsters, confessing, “We have actually, we haven’t figured it out yet, but we’ve looked at a couple older scripts and we would be open to doing that.”
Stay tuned for details on The Invisible Man and the potential future of the Dark Universe.
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