Netflix has a pretty good selection of vampire movies. They distributed fun examples like Blood Red Sky and their take on Dracula. The service holds classics like John Carpenter’s Vampires. It used to be the unhappy home of Morbius, but Madame Web seems to have taken its slot. Though typically buried in the library, you can find one seemingly forgotten superhero horror outing from ten years ago. Dracula Untold finally found the audience it failed to hunt down on Netflix’s international charts.
Dracula Untold Briefly Becomes the Biggest Vampire Movie On Netflix
Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless are my favorite screenwriters of bad movies. Everything they’ve ever put out has exemplified my exact taste in schlock. Their first few projects fell through, but their descriptions remain pretty funny. Sony tapped Sazama and Sharpless for a Flash Gordon remake. Fox brought them in to make Atari’s Missile Command the next big summer blockbuster. Finally, Universal tried to hand them the board game Cluedo. Their first published project as co-writers was Dracula Untold. They segued the film’s moderate box-office success into The Last Witch Hunter. That laughable mess centered on Vin Diesel’s Dungeons & Dragons character, but it still made good money. Gods of Egypt started their decline by being one of the worst action movies ever made. Their Power Rangers remake came and went without commentary. Sazama and Sharpless cemented their bad movie stars forever with the double-header of Morbius and Madame Web.
Dracula Untold has a surprisingly decent premise, combining the history of Vlad the Impaler with the legend of Dracula. The result is essentially a milder version of 300, with a godlike creature of the night in the leading role. In practice, there are more nuanced vampire films on Netflix. Dracula Untold made money, but critics were not kind to it. That sad fate knocked the film out of its original intended position. Remember the Dark Universe? Universal wanted Dracula Untold to be the launchpad for the franchise that would reinvigorate their horror IP into a Marvel Cinematic Universe knock-off. That famous photo of Dark Universe stars came out a week before Dracula Untold hit theaters. Universal tried to downplay Untold, clearing the path for the Dark Universe’s new starting point. The Mummy would come out three years later, lose even more money, and kill the Dark Universe brand forever.
Dracula Untold is a mediocre film surrounded on all sides by far worse ones. Imagine the reality in which everyone settled for this C- project. I wonder if a sequel to Dracula Untold might have sustained the Dark Universe idea long enough for it to survive The Mummy. Could the same sequel have kept Sazama and Sharpless at Universal, rather than letting them play with the Sony Spider-Man Universe? Dracula Untold may be a story about letting good be the enemy of great. It may also be a sub-par action blockbuster with a brief blip of streaming success. Either way, I hope Sazama and Sharpless get to put out another thousand messy, silly, poorly-constructed disasters. Never change, gentlemen.
