When Universal Pictures decided to re-reboot its classic horror franchises from the 1930s – featuring the iconic characters of Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy and the Wolf Man – their first time at bat was with the 2017 movie The Mummy, starring Tom Cruise. It was largely faithful to the overall narrative of the original film, with a screenplay by accomplished screenwriters David Koepp (Jurassic Park, the first Mission: Impossible) and Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects). Don’t remember it? That’s why Universal took the franchise away from Tom Cruise and company (both Koepp and McQuarrie had written movies for him), and teamed up with Blumhouse, a company with a better track record – at least in terms of box office – with horror franchises. Cases in point: Paranormal, The Purge, and Insidious. And for its first time at bat, knowing that it might not get a second without a success, it selected The Invisible Man as its film subject, and hired as its writer-director Leigh Whannell, who wrote not only the first Insidious, but the first three Saw movies. And his approach to The Invisible Man was anything but reverent: He decided to make the title character the villain, not the hero, and to have him use his powers of invisibility to fake his own death and harass and unhinge his ex-wife. And before you dismiss this movie because of its Blumhouse-Saw connections, note that Whannell was smart enough to hire, as the victimized yet resourceful ex-wife, Elisabeth Moss of Mad Men, who already has slam-dunked her genre roles in both The Handmaid’s Tale and Jordan Peele’s Us. This new Invisible Man was released earlier in 2020, but was one of the first films pulled from theatrical release after the pandemic began, and offered as a Movie on Demand as a streaming premiere. We’ve been in seclusion so long that The Invisible Man has made it to its post-release premium cable window of distribution, and has its non-streaming TV premiere tonight on HBO.

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