Dear Universal: Please Let Ryan Gosling’s Wolfman Be The Bad Guy

The Invisible Man succeeded partially by letting its monster be an unapologetic villain rather than a tragic anti-hero.

With The Invisible Man standing tall as the best major studio/wide theatrical release of the year, albeit somewhat by default, Universal
UVV
has reason to be somewhat confident in their new “pitch-specific” approach to their classic monsters IP. Among the films in some stage of development or theoretical existence are Paul Feig’s Dark Army, Dexter Fletcher’s Renfield, Matt Stawski’s Monster Mash, Elizabeth Banks’ The Invisible Woman, Karyn Kusama’s Dracula and James Wan’s Frankenstein. And now we can add Ryan Gosling’s Wolfman to the pile. This has the makings of a very dark universe, especially if these films get made and turn out to be decent.

Yes, we got word yesterday that Ryan Gosling pitched a Wolfman flick which he initially wanted to both direct and star in, but at the moment it’s looking like someone else will direct. Moreover, that list of names above isn’t necessarily a “director-project” list either, as Wan specifically may end up producing while someone else directs. The pitch, set in the present tense and described as a kind of Nightcrawler/Network flick, features Gosling as a news anchor who gets bitten by a werewolf and then presumably does all of the werewolf things. But the big question is whether he’ll be allowed to be a villain.

First of all, making him into a tragic anti-hero, which admittedly is pretty in line with many/most werewolf flicks, would make it not that different from Joe Johnston’s The Wolfman. That 2010 flick was a deeply ambitious and old-school period piece horror movie that played like a loose remake of Ang Lee’s Hulk which itself collapsed under the weight of its admirable ambitions. Benicio Del Toro was a tragic victim of his father’s (Anthony Hopkins) own “I got bitten by a wolf” downfall, seeming to care more about whether the young actor would find love with his dead brother’s fiancee (Emily Blunt) than about the carnage he indirectly caused.

I’ll assume that this new Wolfman flick will cost closer to The Invisible Man ($9 million) than The Mummy ($125 million), so a result equivalent to The Wolfman’s $161 million gross (albeit on a $150 million budget) would actually be just fine for this newfangled version. Nonetheless, without knowing what Gosling’s big ideas happen to be, or how the project will take shape, I’d hope that Universal and friends will note that at least one of the reasons why The Invisible Man became Universal’s first successful “classic monsters” revamp since The Mummy in 1999, was that it let the scary monster in the title be the scary monster in the movie.

Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, which starred Elizabeth Moss as a young woman seemingly tormented by her recently-dead abusive ex, told a present-tense horror story rooted in timely social issues (albeit ones that have been around since the dawn of time) where the title character was allowed to be the unapologetic villain. The Invisible Man, no spoilers, was not a tragic victim of circumstance or a tortured anti-hero in need of redemption. He was, simply put, a vicious monster before and after he “became” the Invisible Man. After years of trying turn these properties (Van Helsing, Dracula Untold, The Mummy) into glorified superhero stories, it was a refreshing change of pace.

There’s a case to be made that the key to revamping these properties and these characters is in simply letting them be scary monsters as opposed to sympathetic protagonists. A Wolfman movie starring Ryan Gosling as a doomed anti-hero, if that’s even how this plays out, is not inherently destined to fail artistically and/or commercially. I thought WB greenlighting Joker right after Wonder Woman was a bad idea, but the Todd Phillips movie worked on its own terms and it earned strong reviews and $1.074 billion worldwide on a $62 million budget. But there is a potential for the project to represent a reversion to old tropes and/or bad habits after an outside the box smash.

Truth be told, there is reason for optimism going forward, especially with the above-noted murderer’s row of distinct talent and IPs that are entirely rooted in specific characters, meaning the movies can be unique unto themselves and essentially anything you want them to be. Neither Peter Finch’s Howard Beale in Network nor (especially) Jake Gyllenhaal’s Lewis Bloom in Nightcrawler were the “heroes” of their respective films, so even if Gosling’s Wolf Man is the protagonist he can still be an unmitigated villain. But the success of The Invisible Man, which made its title character as scary as he’s ever been partially by letting him be the monster, should be a road map going forward.

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