After too many failures at the box office, Universal Studios is giving up on "monster" movies as it plans to morph the genre into a new quasi-superhero monster category.

"We've tried over the years to make monster movies - unsuccessfully, actually," Universal Chairman Donna Langley said, explaining the studio's move to capitalize on the popularity of comic book superhero movies. "So, we took a good, hard look at it, and we settled upon an idea, which is to take it out of the horror genre, put it more in the action-adventure genre and make it present day,"

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One of the most renowned movie-manufacturing companies in the world, Universal Studios popularized the monster genre starting in the 1930s with classic monster films such as Frankenstein, Dracula and The Mummy.

But the studio is no longer the king of the monster genre. Universal spent $150 million in 2010 to make The Wolfman. But the company reportedly ran into numerous problems behind the scenes and only ended up grossing $139 million worldwide.

Most recently, Universal's Dracula Untold, which received a 23 percent rating on RottenTomatoes, has only made $55 million domestically so far since its theater release. Rather than depicting Dracula as pure horror, which led to the legendary monster he is today, Universal instead tried a more Action-Adventure approach in an attempt to entice more fans.

"An orgy of CGI bats and battle stuff -- all of which is remarkably bloodless to hold tight to that PG-13 rating. It's all pretty tepid and mostly cartoonish," Ken Hanke of Mountain Xpress said.

The announcement sparked a lot of controversy among fans within the Horror genre.. It has yet to be seen if implementing monster-films as Action-Adventure works at the box office. But perhaps the problem is with Universal, and not the genre as Dracula Untold currently trails in the box office behind films like Annabelle, from Warner Bros.-owned New Line Cinema.

TagsUniversal Studios, Universal Pictures, Horror films, monster films, horror genre, Dracula, Frankenstein, action-adventure