Tom Cruise has wanted to play Dracula's mortal enemy, the original vampire hunter "Van Helsing" on the big screen for a good few years now, and at one point two summers ago got very close to starring in a movie that horror maestro Guillermo Del Toro was to spearhead at Universal. Despite that adaptation not happening because Del Toro exited for other things (namely "At The Mountains of Madness" which also never happened), Cruise has remained attached to the undead property which looks to be getting a new jolt of life.
Deadline reports that Cruise will star and produce a new attempt at a "Van Helsing" movie at the studio that brought Dracula to Hollywood in the first place, this time to be written by screenwriting blockbuster pairing Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. Those guys are responsible for almost half of the franchises you see in theatres annually having wrote two "Transformers" movies, "Star Trek" and its upcoming sequel, "Cowboys & Aliens" among others. They were most recently hired by Sony to write "The Amazing Spider-Man 2", a sequel to this summer's web-slinging hit. As luck would have it "Cowboys & Aliens" was their biggest disappointment and is the only movie they have wrote at Universal to date but that hasn't stopped the studio giving them the keys to their Universal Horror back catalogue of famous monsters. As well as writing Van Helsing (which won't have anything to do with the Hugh Jackman vehicle from 2004), the duo will also be producing Universal's new take on "The Mummy", which
we heard recently was getting another reboot after three popular films starring Brendan Fraser. Prometheus screenwriter Jon Spaihts is currently working on penning that script that the duo will oversee. Kurtzman and Orci are no on the Universal lot with dedicated offices and hope to revive the two franchises with brand new reboots that won't have any connections to the previous franchises director Stephen Sommers birthed.
