Zombie Franchises: Underworld
Where does one assign the blame for an unkillable schlock franchise?

Zombie Franchises is a series of occasional articles in which Ken Lowe examines one of the shambling intellectual properties that plods onward under sheer force of box office money. Be wary of spoilers for movies that have been out for a while.
“I said no to him professionally many times over the years—some of which ended up with him screaming at me calling me a c*** and making threats, some of which made him laughingly tell people oh ‘Kate lives to say no to me.’ It speaks to the status quo in this business that I was aware that standing up for myself and saying no to things, while it did allow me to feel uncompromised in myself, undoubtedly harmed my career. —Kate Beckinsale, speaking of run-ins with Harvey Weinstein starting ca. 2000
I ask this earnestly: Why is it that I can remember reams of details about the founding of the Jedi Order, rattle off the names of every one of Commander Shepard’s squad members (even the knockoffs that stand in for the ones who die), or recognize the difference between an orc’s 3rd Edition and 5th Edition stat blocks yet remember nothing about the five-part Underworld franchise? Intricate rules and ridiculous continuity are supposed to be what draw me in. This series actually has less lore and yet none of it leaves any impression. It is a mystery I may never solve.
It’s tempting to call the Underworld franchise unique, but it manifestly is not. I’ve written, at length, more than once, about the sheer un-kill-ability of the Resident Evil franchise which is a 1) black-leather slo-mo gun fest 2) starring a cut female action star with superpowers 3) directed and/or produced by her husband. Evidently the theatergoers of the world have enough love in their hearts for this brand of schlock to support two such franchises.
Late last year saw murmurings of a possible Underworld television show, which is becoming the default course of action when your franchise has hit rock bottom. As we wait to hear more, I realize that, like me, many may not actually know much about this series, and more importantly, who is responsible.
Insert déjà vu joke here: The Case Against The Matrix
Maybe we should level that blame at the Wachowskis and specifically Carrie-Anne Moss. In the years immediately following The Matrix trilogy, there were no shortage of lame imitators in every medium. In those innocent days of early 2003, when we were still in just one unwinnable Middle Eastern conflict and even the poor X-Men needed to wear all-black outfits of dubious breathability, there was some unresolved tension between audiences and the character of Trinity: a badass lady in badass leather whose mission in life was mulching henchmen.
Screen Gems—the same font of artistic vision that gave us the Resident Evil series—set its sights on filling that oddly specific yet totally understandable niche and tapped director Len Wiseman to make Underworld.
Underworld (2003) is surely the product that many a red-pill IRC role-player was hoping for. As the vampire “Death Dealer” Selene, Kate Beckinsale is the incarnation of black-clad ultraviolence, a renowned slayer of werewolves, which this series for some reason groaningly insists on calling “lycans” and which I will not do anywhere else in this article. (I am not interested in seeing your homebrew Death Dealer prestige class that you successfully self-published under the d20 Open Game License.)
Memory fails me, but I am willing to state, in writing, in an article which bears my name and is subject to the scrutiny of the internet, that the plot revolves around Selene falling in love with a human scientist who is bitten by a werewolf. In an inspired bit of scripting that presages the sparkling wit on display throughout the series, that werewolf’s name is Michael and his blood is like, really special. Their forbidden love—and vampire/werewolf machinations far too complicated to enumerate here—lead to an absurd number of squibs going off, and equally absurd revelations about why werewolves were slaves of vampires and Who Killed Selene’s Father. Michael even becomes a vampire/werewolf hybrid two full years before Stephenie Meyer published Twilight. I decline to speculate whether we have Underworld to thank for Twilight and its risible unlicensed spin-off Fifty Shades of Grey, but if I had a corkboard and some string and no day job, it would be worth investigating.
All this overwrought ridiculousness brought in $95 million in worldwide box office when all was said and done, and on a $22 million budget. It’s a shame it did so while doing pretty much everything that Blade did but worse. (I acknowledge that Blade is responsible for this vampire-slaying kick, too, with its bad-and-by-bad-I-mean-awesome sequel debuting just the year prior to Underworld, but to suggest any other comparison is, in the words of its protagonist, to ice-skate uphill.)