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It's alive! Can Universal's star-less monster movies rise from the crypt?

The Hollywood studio’s stable of horror classics should be ripe for reinvention. The key to its Dark Universe surely lies in the hands of emerging talent

If the Marvel Cinematic Universe goes down in film history as a textbook example of how to build a perfect spider-web of interconnected movies, with each new arrival in multiplexes enriching and adding nuance to those that came before, Universal’s recently deceased “Dark Universe” will surely be remembered as the exact opposite: a cinematic end of line, full stop, dead end.

The rumblings that this one might have breathed its last breath – before it ever really emerged from a thousand-year slumber to embark on a reign of terror – were there from the beginning. After the studio released a weird-looking shot of Tom Cruise (star of The Mummy) with Johnny Depp (the Invisible Man), Russell Crowe (Dr Jekyll) and Javier Bardem (Frankenstein’s monster) in 2017, it emerged that the image had in fact been put together via composite techniques. Even the A-list actors themselves clearly weren’t confident enough in the future of the franchise to find the time to be properly photographed together.

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from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2sUu7xA
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