Read This: A tribute to the lost, dumb potential of Universal's abandoned Dark Universe

Hollywood is, to borrow a term from sports, a copycat industry. Sustained success is so difficult to come by that anytime a studio does something right, others inevitably attempt to do the same thing. Very rarely, however, do those attempts at mimicry meet with anything approaching the success of the original. Such was the case when Universal attempted to capture some of the magic and profitability of the Marvel Cinematic Universe by creating a shared timeline of its own with a “Dark Universe” that would draw upon the studio’s classic monster movie franchises.
The Dark Universe started and ended with 2017's reboot of The Mummy, a strange and bad film that stands out mostly for its confidence in thinking it would be the beginning of a franchise. (It was never made entirely clear whether 2014's very bad Dracula Untold would wind up being Dark Universe canon. The Mummy’s director said no; star Luke Evans continued to express hope otherwise.) But, as a new essay from The Outline’s J.R. Hennessy argues, perhaps the Dark Universe did have some potential in its own, weird, lurching way.
As Hennessy puts it, the Dark Universe was almost certainly never going to be good, per se, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a chance for some stupid fun. “We didn’t even get to see Russell Crowe’s Mr. Hyde making a snarky quip to the camera before kicking Dracula off a bridge, confirming once and for all that we live in a failed timeline which has strayed spectacularly from God’s design,” he writes.
And, as bad an idea as it all was, it’s easy to forget that there once was a time when the Avengers didn’t necessarily seem like a pop culture home run either.