‘Van Helsing’ Screenwriter Confirms the Monster Hunter Will Show Up In Other Monster Universe Films

Right after completing a new entry in one cinematic universe, screenwriter Jon Spaihts is hopping into another. The Doctor Strange scribe is jumping from the Marvel Cinematic Universe into Universal’s Monster Universe. That’s a lot of universes in one sentence, but it’s exactly what Hollywood is so obsessed with at the moment – making a bunch of movies under the umbrella of a shared world. And now we have some new details straight from Spaihts on how the new monster movies will connect.

The screenwriter will kick off the shared monster-verse with the Tom Cruise reboot of The Mummy, later followed by a reboot of Van Helsing Spaihts is writing with Arrivals scribe Eric Heisserer. The rest of the UMCU (the unfortunate acronym Universal is likely stuck with) will include Johnny Depp‘s Invisible Man, The Wolf Man, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and The Bride of Frankenstein. That’s a whole lot of monsters to defeat, so it only makes sense to bring a famed monster hunter into the mix.

While talking to Spaihts over the phone for Doctor Strange this week, I asked how his Van Helsing will fit into the larger universe and whether we’ll see the monster hunter outside of his solo movie and throughout the franchise:

I do think that if the dark universe works the way Universal hopes it will, you’ll find the protagonists and antagonists of those movies bumping into one another. And yes, I would imagine that Van Helsing, as one of the world’s best monster hunters, would be seen again in other places.

It seems like the Universal monster-verse will be a similar beast to the Marvel and DC movies with characters hopping between films. That makes me wonder though, if Spaihts is writing both The Mummy and Van Helsing, could we see the monster hunter make his debut alongside Cruise next summer? The writer recently told Collider Van Helsing will be set in the present day, making a Mummy cameo slightly more possible (but I’m just grasping here).

There’s no word on whether the titular monster hunter has been cast yet or an official release date. Universal has dates in place on April 13, 2018 and February 15, 2019. Last we heard, The Wolf Man was set for a 2018 release, and if that remains to be true we could be getting Van Helsing by early 2019. Either way, expect to see the modern-day-looking monster hunter making more than one appearance in the years to come.