Universal is officially rebooting its monster movies into an Avengers-style universe

At the end of this October’s Dracula Untold, don’t be surprised if Brendan Fraser’s character from The Mummy shows up and asks the world’s most famous vampire to join Universal’s Monster Movie Initiative. Well, being a little surprised would be OK, because it’ll be pretty crazy if that really happens. The point, though, is that it’s now a slightly more possible situation, since Universal is officially moving forward with its plan to tie all of its old monster movie characters into one Avengers-style shared universe.

We first reported on Universal considering this late last year, but Deadline is now confirming that the studio has hired Star Trek’s Alex Kurtzman and The Fast And The Furious’ Chris Morgan to mastermind a massive reboot of its stable of old-timey movie monsters. Unlike previous attempts to resurrect them in movies like Van Helsing and the Mummy series, these will all be part of one cohesive and interconnected scheme that fits together to tell a single larger story. In other words, it really is just the Avengers thing.

Deadline says this DC Comics-style reboot won’t officially start until Universal releases a new Mummy movie in 2016, but it wouldn’t make much sense for it to not start laying the groundwork for it in the upcoming Dracula Untold. The post does say that Kurtzman and Morgan will “reevaluate projects which have preexisting attachments, and bring it under one cohesive strategy,” which seems to suggest that even if movies like Dracula Untold aren’t a part of the Universal Avengers now, they will be eventually.