We’ve given—rightly—a lot of crap to Universal’s various attempts to modernize its classic monster properties over the last few years, as the studio desperately tried to flail its way into an MCU-style mega-franchise with Tom Cruise, Mummy Hunter somehow occupying the Iron Man role. Cruise aside, though, we have to confess that a lot of the actual casting for these modern creepfests has been spot-on, with Russell Crowe as a man wrestling with anger issues, Elisabeth Moss as the woman being tormented by The Invisible Man, and Jake Johnson doing, well, whatever he was doing in The Mummy. (We don’t totally remember; we just like Jake Johnson.) We can now add “Ryan Gosling playing the Wolfman” to that list of “Yeah, actually, okay”s, with Variety reporting that the First Man star has signed on for a new lycanthropic odyssey. Not only is this pretty exciting from a cinematic point of view, but it’s also, as far as we know, the first time a man named after a small bird has been tapped to play a very large dog. So that’s neat!
People have actually joked about Gosling being a lycanthrope before; his Drive director, Nicolas Winding Refn, once non-seriously confirmed fan theories that Gosling’s character in the 2011 thriller was a creature of the night. And while that’s primarily just classic Shit Nicolas Winding Refn Says, it also speaks to Gosling’s on-screen persona, which is often so inhumanly restrained that you spend half the movie wondering when he’s going to snap and take a bite out of another character’s face.
So far, Universal has named neither a writer, nor a director for this film; the studio also hasn’t confirmed whether it’ll continue its plans to keep its monster properties safely separated from each other in their own individual films. Which is a shame, because we’d love to see Gosling’s wolfman team up with Crowe’s Dr. Jekyll for some big-budget mayhem some time. Oh, and maybe the film could take place during the 1970s—a decade ripe for horror—possibly in a city like Los Angeles. And maybe the wolfman has a great daughter character, and maybe they’re detectives, and maybe they’re trying to solve a mystery about cars that’s largely comedic in tone, and surprisingly winning overall.
So we guess what we’re saying is, dear whoever: Make another The Nice Guys movie, please. You can put a werewolf in it if you want.