Movies
Legendary Bites Into Uni’s ‘Dracua’, Possibly ‘Jurassic Park’!
The producer of monster movies like Godzilla and Pacific Rim is wasting no time in choosing which films he wants to make at Universal Pictures, with Dracula poised to become the first high-profile project his Legendary Entertainment will co-finance with the studio. The film, directed by Gary Shore and starring Luke Evans and Dominic Cooper, is already in production and slated for release August 8, 2014. Legendary is in discussions with Uni executives about coming aboard the project.
Spokespeople for Legendary and Universal declined to comment.
Legendary is combing over Universal’s slate for a number projects it will help fund under its new five-year co-financing and distribution pact with the studio. Tull and his team will also consider co-funding the fourth installment of Universal’s planned reboot of the Jurassic Park franchise, which like Dracula is an offering that would fit well with his fanboy interests and his company’s DNA. (This also explains why Universal delayed the project.)
Jurassic Park 4 — which is expected to begin production next year — is the first of several new big budget tentpoles that Universal is giving the greenlight, including the seventh Fast and the Furious installment. The racing franchise, however, as well as animated movies from Chris Meledandri’s Illumination Entertainment, are excluded from Legendary’s deal with Universal, according to several individuals familiar with the arrangement.
According to several people with knowledge of the agreement that the parties inked this summer, Legendary is committed to invest, on average, $275 million annually in U’s films and its own properties within the first two years of the deal. For the remaining three years, Legendary will invest $350 million a year, these people said, declining to speak on the record because the financial terms are confidential.
For its part, U is committed to invest at least $175 million in a specified handful of Legendary’s films.
For the projects that Legendary and U co-finance, the production company will pay the studio a 10% distribution fee. Legendary’s fee drops to 8% for homegrown movies that it fully finances.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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