Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. Shared Universes are all the rage now in Hollywood, but let's not forget that before it was popular it was the popular Universal Monsters that started bleeding into each others movies. Frankestein fought Wolf-Man long before Batman's beef with Superman or Steve Rogers butted heads with Tony Stark.
So it's not all that surprising to me that Universal's relaunching their horror properties as a new shared universe, but it is surprising to me that they're going for super A-list talent. That kinda skews my thinking on the direction they were going in the wake of stuff like Dracula Untold and previous monster team up movies like Van Helsing and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Tom Cruise is headlining a Mummy film (which still blows my mind) as some kind of modern day soldier fighting a dead guy, I guess, and now THR has the news that they're trying to add in another potential franchise horror icon, or icons if you consider Jekyll and Hyde two different characters (and you should).
Apparently this role has been difficult for the studio to cast, having now had deals fall through with both Tom Hardy and Javier Bardem, but they're trying again, this time in early talks with noneother than Russell Crowe to play the good doctor (and presumably his insane alter ego) as a small part of the Mummy film and spinning him off into his own film. He's got the rage required for Hyde, that's for sure.
This whole thing grows curiouser and curiouser by the day. I have to admit I'm intrigued. We'll see how this plays out.
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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