Tom Cruise’s The Mummy Failure: 8 Reasons Why Dark Universe Failed Before It Began

2017’s reboot of The Mummy was meant to launch a new franchise for Universal called the Dark Universe, but it failed for several reasons and was ultimately scrapped. That came as a huge shock, especially with megastar Tom Cruise in the lead role, fellow A-lister Russell Crowe on board, and a talented supporting cast including Annabelle Wallis, Jake Johnson, Courtney B. Vance, and Marwan Kenzari. On paper, the Dark Universe looked like a guaranteed success.

The reality shows that, even with a massive budget and big names attached, movies can bomb if the other essential ingredients aren’t right — and Cruise’s The Mummy remake had so many fundamental ingredients missing that it was hard to ignore them all. Looking at the film objectively, it’s easy to see why fans and critics panned it, and why the proposed franchise it was a platform for didn’t progress. It may even be one of the most disappointing films of the 21st century, especially since it led to the Dark Universe concept being axed.

8 The Mummy’s Marketing Was Poor

Posters, Billboards, & Trailers Featured Unimportant Details

The marketing for 2017’s The Mummy was fairly uninspired and substandard in general, but there was one particularly irksome aspect to it. Whether it was a poster, a billboard, or a trailer, it all seemed to feature the eponymous Princess Ahmanet’s eyes, each of which had an extra pupil. It suggested they were important and might grant her a mystical ability, but they turned out to be entirely inconsequential.

Viewers were never given a chance to see what these intriguing eyes offered. She may as well have had completely normal eyes. The marketing was terribly misleading in that regard.

It turns out that Tom Cruise had major control over the marketing of the movie and its release strategy (via Variety), which means the star of the movie likely was the reason people went into the film confused as to what it was about.

7 The Mummy Wastes Tom Cruise

The Lead Actor Should’ve Guaranteed Its Success

An iconic and exceptional actor, Cruise has received three Oscar acting nominations for Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire, and Magnolia. Although he’s failed to win, that takes some talent. Sadly, The Mummy completely wastes his involvement by having him play a paper-thin character with very little substance.

He gets little to no opportunity to showcase his charm, and his talents dissolve into an almost perpetual whirlwind of generic action. Considering The Mummy is a Cruise vehicle with the superstar at the wheel, the actor may as well have taken the keys out of the ignition.

This is especially true since Cruise had full creative control of the movie, and that includes what made it into the film. The Mummy is what Cruise thought was the best story and options, but it turned out that he wasn’t really on track with what fans wanted to see, especially from his character.

6 The 2017 Mummy Characters Were Heavily Criticized

The Characters Are Hard To Root For

Despite having the name of the monster in their titles, monster movies rely on great characters to succeed. Jaws, for instance, would be nothing without the palpable chemistry between Roy Scheider’s Martin Brody, Robert Shaw’s Quint, and Richard Dreyfuss’ Matt Hooper. Likewise, Alien and Predator wouldn’t be anywhere near as iconic without Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Dutch and their memorable co-stars.

A major problem in The Mummy is poor characters. If Cruise’s Nick Morton is paper-thin, the supporting characters are microscopic. They were considered underdeveloped and neither interesting nor likable. It’s actually difficult to want them to come out of the movie victorious.

While Annabelle Wallis was her usually solid self as Jenny and Russell Crowe seemed dialed into his character of Dr. Henry Jekyll, the characters themselves were not as interesting as the actors who played them. There is only so much great actors can do when their characters don’t offer anything deeper than their existence.

5 Unfavorable Comparisons To Previous Mummy Versions

The 2017 Movie Couldn’t Live Up To Its Predecessors

Any reboot, remake, or sequel risks being compared unfavorably to its predecessors, and 2017’s The Mummy always had a tough road ahead in that regard. The classic Universal series starring the likes of Boris Karloff (The Mummy, 1932) and Lon Chaney Jr. (The Mummy’s Tomb, The Mummy’s Ghost, and The Mummy’s Curse) and even the horror comedy Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy are widely revered. Plus, 1999’s The Mummy and its first sequel, 2001’s The Mummy Returns, are beloved adventure films.

The 2017 reboot doesn’t live up to them in any way. It lacks the memorable characters, the scares, the humor, and everything fans want in a Mummy franchise film. In that sense, it was doomed from the start. It seemed that none of the Dark Universe’s monsters matched up with what came before, as neither Dracula Untold (2014) nor The Wolfman (2010) fared any better.

4 The Mummy Has Too Much Action

The Action Overshadows Everything Else

In a movie like The Mummy, action is obviously essential. Without any action, the film would be unspeakably boring — more so than it already is — because there would be no sense of urgency or peril. However, 2017’s reboot of The Mummy goes way too overboard with its action. It feels like director Alex Kurtzman believes fans are only entertained by action scenes, so it barely slows down at any point during the film’s run. Eventually, that makes the action seem dull.

However, it also takes away from several other aspects of the story, like character development, suspense, dialogue, and scares. Once again, this might have been Tom Cruise’s fault, as he had control over almost all aspects of the movie’s production. With Cruise a master of action movies in the Mission: Impossible franchise, he might have wanted to replicate that feeling with the Universal Horror monsters, and what resulted was less scary and more of an action movie with a monster in the background.

3 The Mummy’s Comedy Is Weird And Misplaced

Tom Cruise Tries Too Hard & Too Often

Cruise has proven many times that he has perfectly passable comedy chops. 1983’s Losin’ It and Risky Business, 1988’s Cocktail, 2008’s Tropic Thunder, 2010’s Knight and Day, and 2017’s American Made are just some movies in which Cruise has shown his funny side.

However, in The Mummy, on the few occasions he engages in dialogue, he tries too hard to be funny and does it too often. It doesn’t work out — not just because The Mummy isn’t a comedy, but because the rest of the cast are playing darker or more serious characters and aren’t remotely on the same page. It’s misplaced and falls completely flat.

There often needs to be humor in horror movies, and it needs to be well placed, but as someone who hasn’t done much horror in his career, it seems that Cruise never knew when the best times to crack a joke or add some humor was. The movie needed to be more scary and less funny.

2 The Dark Universe Was Forced And Rushed

Henry Jekyll Should Have Been Introduced Later

The Mummy was intended to be the opening installment in a franchise, Universal’s Dark Universe. Everyone understood that, but it didn’t need to be forced down the audience’s throats or feel rushed and contrived. To use a common phrase: it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

It was, therefore, deeply unnecessary for Russell Crowe’s Henry Jekyll to be shoehorned into the movie as the Dark Universe’s version of Nick Fury. It was even less necessary to see his transformation into Eddie Hyde, which could have been a big reveal at a later time.

The better use could have been saving Dr. Jekyll for the post-credit scenes, the same way that Iron Man teased Nick Fury and the future of the MCU. Adding Dr. Jekyll would have been a great way to get people excited for the future of the Dark Universe, which might have saved the franchise even with a lackluster outing here.

1 The Mummy Isn’t Scary

The Titular Character Just Didn’t Frighten Anyone

Likely the most crucial factor in The Mummy’s failure — and its unfortunate failure to launch the Dark Universe — is that it simply isn’t scary. A Mummy movie doesn’t necessarily have to be scary especially since the beloved Mummy films starring Brendan Fraser weren’t frightening for the most part.

However, when it’s meant to be the platform from which a franchise called the Dark Universe is born, it should feature some classic and appropriately scary cinematic monsters. Even Fraser’s movie had a great showing by Arnold Vosloo as an intimidating monster.

The 2017 film promised a lot, but it lacked suspense, scares, and an eponymous antagonist who’s remotely frightening. Ahmanet offers nothing in terms of scares at any point in The Mummy. What hurts even worse is that Ahmanet picked up comparisons to Cara Delevingne’s Enchantress from Suicide Squad, another movie that received terrible reviews and also complaints about its lackluster villain.

The Future Of The Dark Universe

The Mummy may have single-handedly destroyed the initial plans for a Dark Universe, but that doesn’t mean the idea has been entirely abandoned. In the years since that film’s notorious failure, there have been some more movies to bring the classic Universal monsters back to the big screen with mixed results. One of the biggest successes was 2020’s The Invisible Man, which served as a modern and clever retelling of the classic story.

Post-The Mummy Universal Monster Movies:

The success of that movie led to rumors that Universal would be attempting to bring more of these classic monsters back in projects with a similar serious tone. However, to date, Wolf Man starring Christopher Abbott and directed by The Invisible Man‘s Leigh Whannell, is the only movie continuing that idea. In the meantime, there have been several other interesting approaches. Dracula made a return in Universal’s Reinfeld with Nicolas Cage in the role. However, while Cage’s performance was well-received, the more comedic movie failed at the box office.

While there seems to be some lack of direction for the Dark Universe in terms of the movies, there are some other exciting developments in the works. It was announced that Universal Studios theme park in Orlando will be opening a Dark Universe attraction which is expected to be open to the public in May 2025. What the Dark Universe world of Universal Orlando will look like is shrouded in mystery, but it is expected that there will be a lot of the iconic monster character and it has been described as follows (via The Wrap):

Where guests encounter everything from the experiments of Dr. Victoria Frankenstein to the shadowy landscape where monsters roam in a world of myth and mystery.

Directed by Alex Kurtzman and starring Tom Cruise, The Mummy is a 2017 reboot of the cult classic Mummy franchise that originally starred Brenden Frasier. This time, the plot follows a U.S. Army Sergeant as he attempts to stop the mummy of Princess Ahmanet from summoning the Egyptian diety Set.

Director

Alex Kurtzman

Release Date

June 9, 2017

Runtime

1h 50m