Announcement of Monster High's comeback
After the cancellation of the Monster High franchise in 2018 due to the failure of the 2016 reboot, on February 23, 2021, Mattel, through its television division, announced the second return of the Monster High brand, promising new content and products for the following year, including a new animated series and a live-action film based on the franchise, both of which will air on Nickelodeon in the United States. On November 9, 2021, the film's cast and director were revealed with the latter being Todd Holland (who directed 50 episodes of The Larry Sanders Show, 26 episodes of Malcolm in the Middle and the movie The Wizard) and the former at time of announcement being Miia Harris as Clawdeen Wolf, Ceci Balagot as Frankie Stein and Nayah Damasen as Draculaura.
Background and context
Monster High is an American fashion doll franchise created by Garrett Sander for Mattel, with illustrations by Kellee Riley and Glen Hanson, and was launched in 2010. Initially consisting only of dolls and a web series, it soon expanded to also include other various consumer products mainly marketed towards children, such as other types of toys, clothing and accessories, books and comics, stationery, and more. It features characters inspired by monster movies, sci-fi horror, thriller fiction, folklore, mythology and popular culture. This franchise involves the teenage children of famous monsters which are Draculaura, Frankie Stein, Clawdeen Wolf and Cleo de Nile, Lagoona Blue attend a high school called Monster High. The first two movie specials were animated in Flash which later switched to CGI animation by Nerd Corps Entertainment in 2012 starting with Why Do Ghouls Fall in Love? and ending in 2016 with Great Scarrier Reef, the franchise was rebooted in 2016 with a reboot and origin story film special called Welcome to Monster High, using revamped face molds, upgraded animation technologies and techniques, the 2016 reboot was not well-received by critics and fans and the failure of the 2016 reboot caused the franchise to be cancelled in February 9, 2018.
Before the announcement of the 2022 film, there was a previous attempt at making a live-action Monster High film in the brand's launch year of 2010. Universal Pictures (then Universal Studios) announced that a live-action, around-the-world musical adventure film would be directed by Ari Sandel, written by Craig Zadan, Neil Meron, Stephanie Savage and Josh Schwartz, with the latter two handling the screenplay and given a scheduled release date of October 7, 2016.
Reception
The announcement was well-received and excited from Monster High fans who get to see the franchise coming back after 3 years of being in hiatus. The Twitter post with an image showing the Monster High logo on the purple smokey background from the official Monster High Twitter account received 97,1 thousand likes and 10,8 thousand retweets.