Tamal Kundu
The shooting of Ryan Gosling’s horror film ‘Wolfman’ is set to begin in May 2024 in New Zealand. Directed by Derek Cianfrance, who has previously worked with Gosling in films such as ‘Blue Valentine’ and ‘The Place Beyond the Pines,’ ‘Wolfman’ will reportedly have a modern setting, drawing inspiration from ‘Nightcrawler,’ the 2014 neo-noir psychological thriller film written and directed by Dan Gilroy and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Bill Paxton, and Riz Ahmed.
According to reports, Gosling himself came up with the idea for the film, and Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo drafted an earlier version of the screenplay. Leigh Whannell, who previously helmed the 2020 feature ‘The Invisible Man,’ was initially set to direct the film. Following his departure from the project, Cianfrance became involved, making ‘Wolfman’ his third collaborative effort with Gosling.
For decades, Universal has tried to replicate the success of its classic monster films from the Golden Age of Hollywood by developing big-budgeted movies around these iconic monsters. The result has been predominantly less than stellar. For every ‘The Mummy’ or ‘The Mummy Returns,’ there has been a ‘Van Helsing.’ More recently, the production house’s attempt to build an MCU-style franchise seemed to have a disastrous end after the failure of the 2017 reboot ‘The Mummy,’ starring Tom Cruise.
Despite the abrupt end of the Dark Universe, which was what the unsuccessful franchise was called, Universal joined forces with Blumhouse Productions (‘Paranormal Activity,’ ‘Insidious,’ and ‘Get Out’) to produce ‘The Invisible Man.’ The film takes a classic Universal monster and uses them to tell a genuinely unsettling and modern story about gaslighting and domestic abuse, with remarkable performances from Elisabeth Moss and Oliver Jackson-Cohen. If things go according to plans, ‘Wolfman’ will likely be the second monster movie made jointly by Universal and Blumhouse.
In an October 2021 interview with Collider, Jason Blum, the CEO of Blumhouse, revealed they had plans to develop more projects with Universal monsters. “We have two or three we’re developing,” he said. “They’re not yet announced, so I can’t talk about them. But the status with Universal monsters is no different than it’s ever been. Universal is in charge of the Universal monsters. But we’ve come up with a few ideas that they’ve like for a few of their other ones. And hopefully, we’ll turn those into movies.”
Previously, there have been two iterations of the Wolfman. Lon Chaney Jr portrays the eponymous character in the 1941 film ‘The Wolf Man,’ reprising the role in four other projects, including ‘House of Frankenstein’ and ‘House of Dracula.’ Benicio del Toro transforms into the furry monster in the 2010 film ‘The Wolfman,’ which was a critical and commercial failure. There were plans to develop a project around the character as part of the Dark Universe, but that fell apart after 2017’s ‘The Mummy’ flopped.
In July 2022, Gosling offered an update on ‘Wolfman’ in an interview with Collider. “I just would do anything with Derek [Cianfrance], but the idea of doing something like that just seems really exciting,” the actor said. “It’s new for both of us, but in some way, I feel like it’s kind of the movie we’ve made already a few times, but in literal form. We’ve always kind of made the metaphorical version of it, and it’s sort of like the opportunity to really, to just make the literal version of what we’ve been hacking away at.” In the coming months, we can expect further updates on the casting and plot of the film.
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