Really, you're going to try to reboot The Munsters again?
James Wan is set to be the latest creative to devote time and energy to reviving a brand that almost nobody on the planet seems to want
How’s the old expression go? Get yourself a partner who looks at you the way Universal looks at trying to get money out of its long-moribund Munsters franchise in the 21st century?
We’ll confess we’re not entirely sure what the studio sees in the prospect of new projects set in a universe where the basic joke is “What if a Frankenstein and a Vampirella got together and had a Wolfman?” but it hasn’t stopped Universal from trying, again and again—with Variety reporting today that the Universal Studio Group has reportedly put a new Munsters TV reboot into early development. (Alongside a TV show based off of 1976's Car Wash. Big day for Car Wash fans.)
The title of the prospective project, 1313, harkens back to the address the Munsters live out their low-rent Addams Family lives in—but also draws immediate comparisons to Mockingbird Lane, Bryan Fuller’s past effort to make a non-embarrassing Munsters show in the 2010s. That series, which aired its pilot as a Halloween special on NBC in 2012, starred Jerry O’Connell, Portia de Rossi, and Eddie Izzard, and was ultimately dropped like a load of spooky bricks by the network after they realized they didn’t actually want to be in the “slightly dramatic hour-long sitcom about monsters” business.
The logline for this new series, meanwhile—which was co-developed by James Wan, Lindsey Anderson Beer, and Ingrid Bisu—promises that it “lives and breathes within the Universal Monsterverse,” and, seriously, somebody needs to take that particular brand away from Universal, before they do themselves even more mischief than what was unleashed by the whole Dark Universe debacle.
Anyway, this is the part of the article where we have to acknowledge that Rob Zombie also made a Munsters movie in 2022. Critical reception to the film was mixed, trending toward godawful, but lord knows that isn’t going to stop someone from making another damn Munsters thing, until one of these projects finally replicates the “success” of the original, which, we feel moved to remind everybody, lasted for all of two seasons back in 1964, where it battled it out with Gilligan’s Island for decidedly tepid ratings.