Perhaps the funniest part of last summer's reboot of The Mummy is before the film even begins: The planet-shaped Universal logo continues turning longer than it should to eclipse itself into a brand-new Dark Universe logo. It's so utterly hilarious in its hubris and effectively meaningless just one movie into a grand plan that one can't help but admire it. Like The Mummy itself, the Dark Universe was likely going to be bad, but not so bad that I didn't want to see it. Too bad it might be dead, then.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, two of the chief architects of the Dark Universe, Alex Kurtzman (currently heavily involved in Star Trek: Discovery) and Chris Morgan (Famous for writing almost every Fast and Furious movie) have left the endeavor. Combined with the news that The Mummy underperformed worldwide and that the next film, Bride of Frankenstein, has been put indefinitely on hold, it really sounds like the whole Dark Universe is done once again, after swiping away the first effort to kick things off, Dracula Untold.

There are hopes that it may, somehow, survive—THR reports that the Universal Monsters are being shopped around to exciting producers like Jason Blum to revamp. The characters, after all, are too valuable to really ever go away. But the Dark Universe's approach—one that nakedly mimics the Marvel Cinematic Universe from the outset, planning a constellation of films that share connective tissue that doubles as marketing for the next film down the line in the hopes of a giant crossover with giant profits—might be dead. In fact, the trend of building out cinematic universes might be dying out with it.

Consider Warner Bros., who, according to various reports about its next Batman film and weird plans for a prestige Joker movie, seem to be increasingly amenable to producing films about DC superhero films that are not connected to the DCEU. Or Hasbro, which has been talking a big game about spinning out a cinematic universe piggybacking off of Transformers: The Last Knight and a potential G.I. Joe reboot for over a year, with little to show for it. And then, of course, there's Sony, a company that flubbed a Spider-Man cinematic universe so bad they just folded their next Spidey into the MCU proper.

As a rule, it generally takes large corporations several years and billions of dollars wasted to learn things that normal people could tell you after maybe 30 seconds of thought, but here we are, now with proven evidence that the cinematic-universe model isn't really a sustainable one that makes sense to pursue for its own sake. No one goes to a movie because it's set in a cinematic universe. That's absurd. But can you interest people in a cinematic universe? Absolutely. Look at The Conjuring, or the 20th Century Fox's extraordinarily clever use of the X-Men franchise. These things aren't going away, but the herd is thinning out—and it seems, thankfully, that the smart movies are winning.

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