Ryan Gosling will be 'The Wolfman' in new Universal monster movie

Ryan Gosling has signed up to play the Wolfman in a new monster movie from Universal.

Variety reports that the Drive star will take on the iconic role as part of the studio's reboot of its famous monster properties.

Though details remain scarce, it's thought that the movie will take place in the present day, in a similar contemporary twist seen with the recent Invisible Man.

Penning the script will be Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, who worked together on Netflix series Orange Is The New Black.

The werewolf creature first appeared on screen for Universal in 1935, in Werewolf of London, but was most memorably seen in Lon Chaney Jr's The Wolfman in 1941, set in Wales and also starring horror icon Bela Lugosi.

Much more recently, Universal rebooted the property in 2010, with Benicio Del Toro as the beast, alongside Anthony Hopkins and Emily Blunt, but it tanked at the box office.

Then came the plans for Universal's 'Dark Universe', which hoped to resurrect the monster IP.

But it fell spectacularly flat, Tom Cruise's The Mummy in 2017 costing the studio nearly $100 million in losses.

Plans for further movies with Russell Crowe as Dr. Henry Jekyll/Mr. Edward Hyde, Javier Bardem as Frankenstein's Monster and Johnny Depp as The Invisible Man were then shelved.

But this year, alongside horror imprint Blumhouse, Saw creator Leight Whannell brought a low-budget Invisible Man to the screen, re-positioning the movie with a modern twist, and raking in a healthy profit.

Now the monster series is back up and running, with more modest budgets in place, and a host of movies in the pipeline.

Upcoming movies include Renfied, about Dracula's henchman, directed by Dexter Fletcher, The Invisible Woman helmed by Elizabeth Banks, The Bride of Frankenstein, penned by David Koepp (who wrote Cruise's ill-feted The Mummy).

There's no date in place for Gosling's Wolfman as yet.