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As we approach Halloween, my thoughts turn — as they have done multiple times in the past seven years — to the true horror of Halloween: the fact that Universal’s proposed Dark Universe never actually came to pass.

For those with short memories for utterly failed shared cinematic universes, a a quick reminder about Dark Universe, the universe that never actually was. Intended as a Marvel-esque shared universe reboot of the classic Universe Monsters — the Mummy, Dracula, the Invisible Man, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein’s Monster, and the Wolfman — Dark Universe was a much-hyped project that came from Alex Kurtzman and Fast & Furious architect Chris Morgan. It was, to be blunt, a shockingly ambitious undertaking revealed in the ramp-up to the release of 2017’s The Mummy, starring Tom Cruise. Not only did The Mummy have to succeed on its own terms (Spoilers: it flopped), but it also had to carry the weight of no less than seven announced spin-off movies: Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Phantom of the Opera, Hunchback of Notre Dame and Invisible Man, with cast lists for those movies including Javier Bardem (who was to play Frankenstein’s Monster) and Johnny Depp, who’d play the Invisible Man.

As part of the Dark Universe roll-out — all of which happened before the release of the first movie, remember — Universal also revealed that Russell Crowe would play Henry Jekyll, who’d lead a SHIELD-esque organization called Prodigium that would link all the movies together. Even before the first movie in the series was released, the second movie in the universe was already announced for 18 months later: Bride of Frankenstein, to be directed by The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn’s Bill Condon. He’s also worked on Chicago and Dreamgirls, so maybe it was going to be a musical; we’ll never know, because it never happened.

What you have to remember about all of this was that 2016 and 2017, when all of this was being announced and coming together, was the point where Marvel Studios was what every studio in the business wanted to be, with its seemingly guaranteed fanbase for every single release, and the “shared universe” was seen as the key to making that happen. Hence, you had Hasbro making plans for a shared cinematic universe that would include the Transformers, GI Joe, Micronauts, and more, and you had Warner Bros. having just released Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad in an attempt to build out its own shared universe. In this context, Dark Universe made some kind of sense.

Except, of course, The Mummy flopped, and it never happened. The Dark Universe… stayed dark, and we’re all the worse for it.

I know, I know; that feels like hyperbole and, who knows, maybe the Dark Universe would have just produced movies as generic and boring as all the detractors loudly proclaimed when it was officially announced… except… The Mummy is a really, honestly, strange movie. It’s not good, exactly, but it’s utterly fascinating in the choices that it makes, and it’s seeming lack of awareness that it is, in fact, a mummy movie and not a remake of An American Werewolf in London. For example: there is no mummy in the movie at all. But there is a ghost of the main character’s dead friend, who tells him that he needs to die because he’s been infected by a curse… you know, like in An American Werewolf in London. (That the dead friend is Jake Johnson, who brings an entirely different energy to the movie than Tom Cruise, just makes everything better.)

I genuinely wish we’d got to see at least one other Dark Universe movie, to see if this continued. Maybe Bride of Frankenstein would end up being a stealth remake of Alien. Perhaps Creature from the Black Lagoon might have been the Ishtar makeover we’ve always dreamt of. The sky could have been the limit! And, more importantly, if the movies had kept coming, perhaps the Dark Universe would have finally caught on, and the Invisible Man, Wolfman, and other Universal Monsters would once again be the household names they deserve to be…!

Instead, we live in a world where the 2017 hit alternate universe movie was, somehow, Kong: Skull Island. Just think. We almost had a variety of ghouls, goblins, and beasties, instead of Kong and Godzilla over and over again…

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