Ed Solomon has stepped down from writing ‘The Invisible Man’.
The 57-year-old screenwriter was attached to pen the reboot of Universal’s 1950s movie, but recently Alex Kurtzman – who started ‘The Dark Universe’ – admitted he is unsure what the future holds.
And now, Solomon – who penned ‘Men in Black’ and ‘Now You See Me’ – has revealed in an interview with Digital Spy that he’s stepped away from the film, due to star Johnny Depp in the main role, after conflicting ideas with the studio.
He said: "At the end of the day, I think Universal and I had a different idea of what the movie was gonna be. We began thinking that our notions would meld, and I should’ve listened more closely to what they really were wanting. I think Universal has had to come to a kind of reckoning of, ‘What are we doing with the Dark Universe?’ And, ‘What is our real intention with it?’ And I thinking they’re re-configuring it now, which I think is probably good. So I’m not working on it."
Universal Studios made its name with the Universal Monsters movies which began in the 1920s with Lon Chaney’s ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ and ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ and the creature features continued to be popular with audiences for the next three decades with ‘Dracula’, ‘Frankenstein’, ‘The Mummy’, ‘The Wolf Man’ and ‘Creature from the Black Lagoon’ all being major hits whilst making household names of Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr. and Boris Karloff.
The Dark Universe was due to continue with a ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ remake with Angelina Jolie in the title role but that project has been put on hold after Kurtzman – who helmed and co-wrote the Tom Cruise led 2017 reboot of ‘The Mummy’, which was the starting point for the connected series of movies – and co-producer Chris Morgan stepped away from the entire multiverse.