The Monster Squad Director Makes Promising Update About Franchise’s Future

Back in 1987, writer Shane Black and director Fred Dekker brought together the beloved Universal Monsters to face off against a group of best friends in The Monster Squad, with Dekker himself recently noting that the rights to the property will be reverting to him sometime next year, allowing him to potentially move forward on a follow-up project. The film’s blend of humor, horror, and teen-aged hijinks has made it a beloved film in the genre community, yet it failed to make a major impact on audiences at the time, preventing the series from earning a sequel back then, though passion in the property has grown immensely in subsequent decades.

“The answer is no, nobody had any interest in doing a sequel to that movie because the movie didn’t do any business,” Dekker shared with The Thing With Two Heads when asked about whether there had ever been talks of a sequel. “But if we had, if it had been a freak success, and we had a gun to our head to come up with a new one, I would be a little bit at odds about what to do with it.”

Dekker went on to tease one of his original ideas for a sequel, though admitted that his perspective on the material has since changed and that it’s not a certainty any project, whether it be on the big or small screen, will come to fruition, but that the decision will at least be up to him and Black in the near future.

“I have a new [idea] now. There is a world where Monster Squad is still alive, Shane Black and I, in about a year-plus, will co-own the rights to it, so it’s something that I’ve been thinking about, but it’s gotta be done right or not do it,” the filmmaker admitted. “I’m thinking about it as a series. But as a sequel, if we were gonna do a one-off sequel back in the day, the only thing I could think to do is skip ahead to the atomic monsters of the ’50s. Because we’d done all the ’40s monsters, there’s nobody left, really. The Invisible Man, although he’s not really a monster. So my thought is I love Tarantula, I love Them!, although that’s a Warner Bros. movie. The giant insects and the melting face from Tarantula and the Metaluna mutant [from This Island Earth]. Even Universal had some really cool monsters in the ’50s that they didn’t have in the ’40s and that might be the route to go.”

Given the success of Stranger Things, which many Monster Squad fans consider to be derivative of the 1987 film, reviving the property for a new generation seems like a sure-fire success.

Stay tuned for updates on the possible future of The Monster Squad.

Would you like to see the film get a follow-up? Let us know in the comments below!