writer (derogatory). lead designer on Fallen London.
http://twitter.com/notbrunoagain
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With characters like Dracula, the Wolf Man, and the Mummy, it seemed Universal had a winning franchise—then everything went sideways
Did... they? Were people yearning for a new franchise movie about the Wolf Man? Maybe the premise of the 'dark universe' was stupid. People thought it was stupid from day 0. Maybe thinking 'we have a winning franchise on our hands' before you make even one good movie is, like, the error here.
they wanted us to witness the beginning of a new #DarkUniverse, forgetting that you need to give people a movie they like first
It's a good window into what executives think a "sure thing" is compared to normal people. Universal didn't seem to realize that they had the equivalent of vanilla ice cream - something so basic and foundational (Universal's Dracula is coming up on its 100th birthday!) that it doesn't excite people simply by existing. If the word of mouth becomes that "hey actually this is really good vanilla ice cream, like the best I've had" then that gives it more of a reason for existing.
Seems like it really all comes down to the creative team and the strengths of the premises they're working from, though. And yeah as the article says, franchise building probably works really differently for horror vs superheroes.
I think when writing about large-scale failures it's a really common framing device to talk about "what went wrong," like there's specific failure points and the plotline is a Greek tragedy. But sometimes you need to ask, was success the "default" outcome here until it got derailed? (I have a specific bee in my bonnet in this regard about retrospectives of Google Wave.)
This was the time when every exec saw the MCU printing $$$ and said "I want one." They all tried. How many succeeded? I think it's literally zero, right? None of them succeeded.
I really do think some fraction of this was movie studios thinking they "connected universe" was basically they could crank out franchise movies, the same way they've been doing for fifty years, but somehow it makes more money. What did they actually do differently, that they expected different results?
The only way this could have worked (y'know, besides creatives being allowed to make a good series of products without executive meddling) is if Universal would've tried this instead of the sequels to 1999's The Mummy. That was a powerhouse vehicle that could've launched a thousand ships.
Gutted we missed out on the DU and watching Dark Universe: Armageddon Part 2 and being like "oh that's Skellington Man, in Wolf Man: Origins he was secretly recruited to Monster Squad by Dracula to defeat Captain Mummy"
