Elizabeth Banks is taking on another piece of pop-culture iconography. With her new Charlie’s Angels out in theaters now, the filmmaker has signed on to direct a new take on the classic Universal monster The Invisible Woman, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The original movie came out in 1940, and starred John Barrymore as a scientist who, as the trailer tells us, “has discovered a new way to get rid of a woman!†How zany! While The Invisible Man was a horror picture, Woman came later and was billed as “the wildest, most hilarious mix-up ever put on film,†and was about a model turned invisible by a batty professor — because science is crazy — who ends up getting involved with the mob when she just wanted to run a payback scheme on her old boss. As one does. Banks will direct a script from The Girl on the Train screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson. (Let’s hope this movie is at least half as drunk as that one was.)
This is the latest title to emerge as Universal revives its famed monster squad. Writer and director Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, starring Elisabeth Moss, will arrive in theaters next year. The studio recently announced that Rocketman’s Dexter Fletcher will direct a take on the Dracula mythology called Renfield, which focuses on the vampire’s most famous familiar, and Paul Feig is even developing a modern original Universal monster movie called Dark Army to build onto the canon. Monsters abound!