It didn’t take too long to turn it all around, did it? After THE MUMMY with Tom Cruise misfired on most of its cylinders—I liked the movie, but there’s no harm in liking a seriously flawed movie, and well, Sofia Boutella looks ah-may-zing in bandages and corpse makeup—the proposed Dark Universe looked to be dead in the water. We all should know better, though, when dealing with the Universal Monsters. They may be killed off again and again, but they always come back. THE MUMMY tanked and the “grand design” for a shared cinematic universe, focused on “action-adventure” instead of Horror, went belly-up. As of this past weekend, how things have changed.
THE INVISIBLE MAN was a huge hit. It had a budget of $7 million. The formula is that a movie must make 2 and ½ times its budget to be considered a success. That would mean THE INVISIBLE MAN would have had to bring in around $18 million over the course of its entire run to count it as a win. It made $29 million domestically and another $20 million internationally—in just its opening weekend! This way overshot the projections, which were that it would bring in some $20 million domestically. Blumhouse can make great movies on the cheap, relatively speaking, with now-proven lucrative returns. Expect Universal to hand over the Monsters to Blumhouse, carte blanche. And that’s a really good thing.
