One of the biggest bits of horror news this year so far was that Leigh Whannell has written and will be directing a new take on The Invisible Man for Blumhouse, part of a new initiative from Universal in the wake of the failure of their Dark Universe. That entire action-heavy universe has been scrapped, with a new focus on horror and fresh voices.
In a chat with Collider this week, Jason Blum details how The Invisible Man came together, while also teasing the general tone and approach that Whannell will be taking.
“I don’t believe in saying ‘We’re going to do movies about this’ and then trying to find a movie about it,” Blum told the site, explaining that Blumhouse doesn’t (yet) plan on taking on the entirety of the Universal Monsters franchise. “So I didn’t believe in going and saying ‘I want to do all these movies’, and then try to find directors to do them. We have a director who… we’ve also done six or seven movies with, pitched us this spectacular idea about Invisible Man. We told him to write it, he wrote it, then we took it to the studio and said ‘We’d love to do this and this is what we would do with it,’ and they said yes.”
He continued, describing Whannell’s script, “It was like the Blumhouse version of The Invisible Man. It’s a lower-budget movie. It’s not dependent on special effects, CGI, stunts. It’s super character-driven. It’s really compelling. It’s thrilling. It’s edgy. It feels new. Those were all things that felt like they fit with what our company does. And it happened to be an Invisible Man story, so it checked both boxes. And we responded to it because I think Leigh is just an A+ director.”
Blum noted during the interview that the planned budget for Whannell’s The Invisible Man will very likely be between 5 million and 10 million dollars. In other words, a much safer bet than Universal’s own The Mummy back in 2017, which had a MASSIVE production budget.
Sounds like the Universal Monsters are finally on the right path, eh?
