I might have more serious theories and hot takes to share later but my aboslute fav headcanon is that the 2004 Van Helsing movie is actually a self-insert fanfiction written by Wolverine (from the X-Men).
Like that version of Van Helsing was already deliberately written to be a Wolverine Clone: Hugh Jackman playing a seemingly-immortal, amnesiac anti-hero who ends up with beastial powers and kills the woman he loved? Yeah, I see what you were trying to do here, Universal.
So I like to imagine one of Wolverine's many Spunky Teen Girl Sidekick introduced him to fanfiction, and being the 200 year old man that he is, he decided that his fandom of choice would be Classic Horror Novels and Universal Monster Films and he wrote this utterly ludicrous fanfic about Basically Himself as Monster Hunter in the middle of a massive monster crossover.