In Universal Pictures’ The Mummy, in theaters June 9th, Russell Crowe plays Dr. Henry Jekyll, the owner of the Prodigium. As we’ve speculated in several posts, Crowe is the heart of the new Universal monsters universe as all of the film’s will revolve around his laboratory, with Tom Cruise being the Van Helsing-esque character that jumps from films to film battling all of the creatures. Several of The Mummy trailers and television spots have revealed this with a series of shots displaying the Prodigium, with one of the rooms holding years of research…jars filled with monster parts and other random historical artifacts. We’ve already noted that you can see a vampire’s skull (is it Dracula’s?), but now we’ve discovered a clear shot of the Creature’s fin from The Creature From the Black Lagoon! What other specimens are hiding in that massive room? Well, you can now tour the Prodigium on this VR website, which is hidden in the back of a real museum. Here’s a look at the fin (thanks to @TallyDude).
Speaking of The Creature From the Black Lagoon, Uni has had their eyes on Scarlett Johansson for the remake since 2015.
A remake technically been on the slate since 1982, add the site, with original director Jack Arnold in talks to return. The project was ultimately scrapped, with John Carpenter, Gary Ross and Breck Eisner and Guillermo Del Toro each developing separate versions of the project over the next two decades.
The last we heard was that Dave Kajganich, who wrote the Daniel Craig-Nicole Kidman thriller The Invasion several years ago, was penning the screenplay. Bruce Eisner was once attached to direct the redo of the 1954 film that centered on a prehistoric water-breathing humanoid monster that lived in a remote Amazonian river and a group of scientists that want to study him.
I think the future of the monster universe hangs in the balance of how well The Mummy does on June 9th. A massive flop could kill this ambitious new take on the horror franchise before it even dives in.
