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

Summary The marketing for 2017's The Mummy was misleading and featured unimportant details, leading viewers to have false expectations.

Tom Cruise's involvement in the film was wasted as his character lacked substance and did not showcase his talents.

The characters in The Mummy were poorly developed, making it difficult for the audience to root for them and invest in their story.

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, 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, as well as 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.

2:14 Related New 83% Horror Movie Is The Perfect Way To Reboot The Dark Universe 7 Years After Tom Cruise's Failure The Dark Universe has the perfect opportunity to be rebooted thanks to a new horror movie that avoids the issues of Tom Cruise's previous failure.

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

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Cruise is an iconic and exceptional actor and has received three Academy Award 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 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 Versions

The Mummy Couldn't Live Up To Its Predecessors

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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 you should 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.

Related Best Action Movies On Netflix Right Now From the rambunctious RRR to the big and bold Bad Boys II, there are plenty of exciting action movies available to stream on Netflix right now.

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 Its 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 many horror movies in his career, it seems that Cruise was never sure when the best times to crack a joke or add some humor made the movie better. The movie needed to be more scary and less funny.

2 The Dark Universe Is 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 to describe it: 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. All it did was take away from The Mummy as a standalone entity.

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

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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 movies starring Brendan Fraser weren't 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 movie 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 2017's 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.