In Theaters 26 Years Ago, A Classic Universal Monster Was Rebooted With a Modern Twist By A Legendary Director Who Later Disowned The Movie: “It’s Very Boring”
While one Universal monster received a sci-fi horror reboot in 2000, its director admitted that he was never all that interested in the project despite its box office success. The messy history of The Mummy franchise proves that, while the classic Universal movie monsters might be icons of horror cinema, it’s not that easy to reinvent them for a new generation. The action horror of The Mummy franchise was a big hit in the late ‘90s, but the same director’s attempts to carry this style over to the story of Dracula and Frankenstein fell flat in 2004’s Van Helsing.
Similarly, even though 2020’s The Invisible Man saw Saw writer Leigh Whannell turn the classic movie monster into an effective metaphor for misogynistic abuse and coercive control, 2000’s Hollow Man offered a reinvention of the titular villain that bored even its own director. Total Recall director Paul Verhoeven was one of the biggest names in Hollywood sci-fi throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s thanks to high-profile hits like Robocop, Starship Troopers, and the aforementioned Philip K Dick adaptation, but he admitted that he was depressed by how little meaning he could wring from Hollow Man after completing this R-rated reboot of The Invisible Man.
Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man Was Originally Released On August 4, 2000
Starring Kevin Bacon as the sleazy, opportunistic scientist Sebastian Caine, Hollow Man charts the gradual moral and mental dissolution of this sympathetic villain as he becomes increasingly unhinged after an experimental procedure renders him invisible. Armed with the best CGI the early ‘00s had to offer as well as plenty of practical gore effects, Verhoeven’s Hollow Man reimagines The Invisible Man in the vein of Cronenberg’s 1986 body horror classic The Fly, as Caine’s moral breakdown is contrasted with his increasingly inhuman powers and abilities.
On paper, this sounds like an unsettling spin on the old adage of the Spider-Man movies, wherein an immoral character learns that great powers come with great responsibilities, and his subsequent moral failures wreak havoc when he misuses these new powers. However, in practice, Hollow Man is a little too gleefully nasty and gruesome, with too little depth below its surface. Readers who disagree can ask the director himself, who admitted that the movie lacked his signature wit and verve.
In a candid 2013 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Verhoeven said: ”I decided after Hollow Man, this is a movie, the first movie that I made that I thought I should not have made. It made money and this and that, but it really is not me anymore. I think many other people could have done that. I don’t think many people could have made Robocop that way, or either Starship Troopers. But Hollow Man, I thought there might have been 20 directors in Hollywood who could have done that. I felt depressed with myself after 2002.”
Hollow Man Epitomises The Ongoing Problem With Classic Universal Monster Movie Reboots
Verhoeven clarified his position by saying, “It is very boring. I felt that I failed to transform it. What I had made was an on-demand studio movie. I decided I did not want to do that again,” and the critics at large agreed. Unlike Basic Instinct or even the director’s comically infamous Showgirls, which became a cult classic thanks to its unique absurdity, Hollow Man was written off as a paint-by-numbers effort that could have come from any Hollywood journeyman.
This gets at the problem at the heart of Universal horror movie reboots, from Lee Cronin’s The Mummy to 2025’s Wolf Man to 2010’s expensive period horror flop The Wolfman. Viewers will often flock to the cinema too see a retelling of a classic monster movie, but directors are caught between sticking too close to the source material, which risks feeling redundant, or doing something too let-field and atypical, which feels unrelated to the original story. In this regard, perhaps it is no surprise that Hollow Man’s sci-fi horror take on The Invisible Man left its director feeling so hollow and unseen.
