The script for the Dark Universe's unmade Van Helsing movie was also a Dracula Untold sequel. As a franchise, Van Helsing has had a strange history. The success of Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula in 1992 led to talk of a spinoff centered around Anthony Hopkins' Van Helsing as he fought new supernatural threats. That project didn't ultimately happen, but a Van Helsing movie later arrived in the form of the Hugh Jackman fronted action-adventure of the same name. This 2004 blockbuster saw the titular hunter fight Dracula, the Wolfman, Frankenstein's Monster and the Brides Of Dracula.
Despite Universal setting up Van Helsing as a new franchise in the vein of director Stephen Sommers' The Mummy, that didn't come to pass. The movie - which also received an anime prequel dubbed The London Assignment and a video game - performed below expectations, and a planned TV series spin-off was scrapped. The movie also received bad reviews and talk of a sequel quickly vanished. Universal has never stopped trying to make use of its legacy of Universal Monster movies, but over the years, reboots like The Wolfman or 2017's The Mummy have failed to connect with audiences.
The latter movie starred Tom Cruise and was the official first entry in Universal's Dark Universe, which was to be a shared cinematic universe featuring characters like The Invisible Man or Dracula. The disappointment of The Mummy saw that plan abandoned, and in development projects like Bride Of Frankenstein - which is being reworked for Scarlett Johansson - and a Van Helsing reboot were canceled. This new Van Helsing was written by Jon Spaihts (Dune) and Eric Heisserer (Arrival) and was a modern-day adventure that saw the hunter chase after a demonic version of real-life countess Elizabeth Báthory. More than that, Van Helsing would have been a Dracula Untold sequel, where the lead character reluctantly teams with Luke Evans' Dracula to hunt Báthory down.
The second draft screenplay of the Van Helsing reboot was broken down on an episode of the Screenplay Archeology podcast. The story opened with a young Van Helsing witnessing the death of his parents at the hands of several monsters, including - seemingly - Dracula. In present day, Van Helsing hunts monsters of all varieties in an RV. It also revealed he was a former member of Prodigium, the secret monster-hunting group introduced in The Mummy and led by Russell Crowe's Dr. Jekyll, who also made a cameo. While Van Helsing is convinced Dracula killed his family, the pair are forced to team up to take on Báthory and her minions, and the story becomes an odd buddy comedy.
What's surprising is that the script uses the character's origin from Dracula Untold, where Evans' Vlad became a vampire to protect his family but it ended up destroying him. Dracula Untold famously underwent reshoots to give it connections to Dark Universe, though it was still undecided at that time if it really was to be the first entry. Van Helsing's unused script confirms the producers behind the Dark Universe did consider Dracula Untold canon for a time, though in interviews for 2017 The Mummy movie it was revealed that was no longer the case. The Van Helsing script portrays Dracula as more of a charming antihero than an outright villain, and outside of suggesting he already killed Charles Dance's Master Vampire from Untold offscreen, it has few links. This was likely due to producers still being undecided if the movies were interlinked, speaking to the creative indecision that eventually ruined the Dark Universe.