Why oh why can’t Hollywood produce a decent werewolf movie?

I’ve had my heart broken twice in the past few months, first by The Beast Within (2024) and most recently by Wolf Man (2025).

I first told you about The Beast Within starring Kit Harington, back in August. In summary, it was lousy. Though the trailer implied a suspenseful, cohesive tale, Beast was a rambling affair that didn’t seem to know what it wanted to be. As for an actual werewolf transformation, it was implied but never really materialized. Instead, director Alexander J. Farrell tried to distract us from this fact with a knee-jerking series of events that barely held together as a story. Even putting Harington half-naked in a dog collar wasn’t enough to make me forgive this mess.

So, if you tell me I should have known better when, with renewed hope, I ran off to the theater last weekend to see Wolf Man, I wouldn’t argue.

Making another attempt at revitalizing the classic monsters franchise ahead of opening its “Dark Universe” park in May, Universal Studios got behind this werewolf movie produced by Blumhouse, which made me think there was a chance it would be good. Afterall, it was Jason Blum who inspired Universal to give their Dark Universe movie franchise another go after Tom Cruise’s The Mummy was an unmitigated atrocity.

Universal had scrapped all the big-budget monster remakes they had teed up, which was more than fine with most fans, including me. Then here comes indie production company Blumhouse, hitting a home run with The Invisible Man (2020). Making nearly $145M on a $7M budget that’s a 20x return, meaning Hollywood couldn’t throw new projects at Jason Blum fast enough. When I heard Blumhouse had been handed the remake of Wolf Man (1941) I dared to be cautiously optimistic.

What a mistake.

I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve sat in a theater looking at my watch. I nearly always find something to love about most movies, but Wolf Man was so awful I would have got up and left had it not been for the tiny flame of hope I had that maybe the ending would redeem my two-hour investment.

It didn’t.

Here’s how Universal described Wolf Man:

Golden Globe nominee Christopher Abbott (Poor Things, It Comes at Night) stars as Blake, a San Francisco husband and father, who inherits his remote childhood home in rural Oregon after his own father vanishes and is presumed dead. With his marriage to his high-powered wife, Charlotte (Emmy winner Julia Garner; Ozark, Inventing Anna), fraying, Blake persuades Charlotte to take a break from the city and visit the property with their young daughter, Ginger.

But as the family approaches the farmhouse in the dead of night, they’re attacked by an unseen animal and, in a desperate escape, barricade themselves inside the home as the creature prowls the perimeter. As the night stretches on, however, Blake begins to behave strangely, transforming into something unrecognizable, and Charlotte will be forced to decide whether the terror within their house is more lethal than the danger without.

Sounds promising right? And for the first 20 minutes or so it kind of was. The dialog was lame, but the premise was interesting. En route to the childhood home in the middle of nowhere, the family gets into an accident and as they extricate themselves from the wreckage, the dad is bitten by an animal that runs off before they get a good look. Que the slow transformation of the dad into a werewolf which could have been awesome but instead was so drawn out and mind-numbingly boring it made me angry.

And come on – we had two fabulous werewolf movies back in the 80s in the form of The Howling (1981) and American Werewolf in London (1981), so someone in Hollywood must have kept the instructions on how to create a credible werewolf transformation with practical effects.

But no. Wolf Man not only failed in its plot and dialog, but it utterly and completely defecated the mattress in creating an even remotely interesting werewolf.
So why does Hollywood keep getting werewolves wrong? The answer might lie in their complexity. Werewolves require nuance, and filmmakers seem allergic to it. Moreover, there are considerable technical challenges of depicting a werewolf convincingly. While CGI can be incredible, the extreme overuse of computer effects has resulted in a bit of audience backlash, causing filmmakers to go back to practical effects which clearly can’t keep pace with a modern audience’s expectations.
Finally, there’s a lack of fresh ideas. Perhaps it’s time for filmmakers to take inspiration from outside the box—or at least hire a scriptwriter who doesn’t think “lycanthropy” is just a fancy word for mood swings.

Despite these missteps, there’s still a tiny glimmer of hope for us werewolf fans. Enter Robert Eggers, the visionary director behind Nosferatu (which I’ve seen multiple times and absolutely loved – more on that next week). Eggers has announced his next project, Werwulf, will be a period horror film that promises to blend folklore, psychological terror, and meticulously crafted visuals into the ultimate werewolf tale.

Fans of Eggers know his penchant for historical authenticity and atmospheric storytelling, which could make Werwulf the fresh take that the genre desperately needs. With Eggers at the helm, there’s genuine hope that audiences will finally get a werewolf film that balances primal horror with emotional depth.

Hollywood, the ball’s in your court. But for now, maybe leave the werewolves alone for a bit. They deserve a better cinematic fate than what they’ve had recently.