Is Renfield Rebooting Universal’s Dark Universe? Robert Kirkman Responds (Exclusive)

Universal Pictures is tapping back into its monster-filled sandbox. The critically-acclaimed studio is putting an R-Rated comedic spin on the classic Count Dracula story in the form of Renfield, a Nicholas Hoult-led film that spotlights the iconic vampire’s servant. Renfield arriving on the big screen has been somewhat of a long time coming for the creatives behind it, as the story was first floated around back in 2019 by championed comic writer Robert Kirkman. After receiving the green light, The Lego Batman Movie‘s Chris McKay joined the project as its director, with Hoult, Nicolas Cage, Awkwafina and Ben Schwartz rounding out the ensemble in 2021.

Speaking to ComicBook.com at the Renfield press junket, Kirkman revealed that getting his pitch from his brain to Universal was a “pretty quick process.”

“I was working with Universal. I knew they were doing a lot of exciting stuff for the Universal monsters, and I wanted to be a part of it,” Kirkman said. “I was trying to find a unique way into Dracula that was kind of off the beaten path, because in 2019, the Dark Universe stuff was still rumbling, and they were kind of excluding Dracula for whatever reason. What’s a way to dance into Dracula in a way that’s unexpected? Oh, we’ll do it through the lens of Renfield.”

The “Dark Universe” that Kirkman alluded to was a short-lived cinematic universe that Universal Pictures attempted to officially get off the ground in 2017 with Tom Cruise’s The Mummy. Russell Crowe appeared in that film as Dr. Jekyll with the idea that he would spin off into his own project afterwards. A-Listers like Johnny Depp and Javier Bardem inked deals to portray The Invisible Man and Frankenstein’s monster, respectively, but The Mummy‘s lackluster box office return.

“I think there’s a lot of potential there,” Kirkman said when asked of expanding Renfield into a wider universe moving forward. “I’ve been saying I’m a comic book writer, so that’s kind of how my mind works. I’m always thinking about where the story goes next, where the next issue is how you pay off the cliffhanger. I certainly have ideas. There’s a lot of opportunity to expand different explorations of different characters that are in Renfield and also the larger world that Renfield takes place in. We’ll just have to see if the movie does well enough to justify it.”

While a greater world could materialize down the line, Kirkman emphasized that Renfield was and currently is envisioned as a standalone.

“Any movie you make at this point, you always have it in the back of your head. Maybe we’ll do a sequel if it does well enough, but Universal was great in that they gave us the latitude to make this a complete piece. It’s its own movie,” Kirkman explained. “I harken it to how you watched Star Wars: A New Hope, and it’s like there’s a complete story there. That is a satisfying movie in and of itself. There’s not anything done in that movie to set up Empire Strikes Back, but they definitely created a world that had infinite possibilities and hopefully we’re doing something like that here.”

Renfield hits theaters this Friday, April 14th.