“The Mummy‎” director Alex Kurtzman: This film was the biggest failure of my life, and it led to the immediate abortion of the Universal “Dark Monster Universe”

Recently, “The Mummy‎” director Alex Kurtzman said when promoting the new drama “The Man Who Fell to Earth‎” that the 2017 film was the biggest failure of his personal and professional career.

The film, starring Tom Cruise, cost Universal Pictures $95 million, and the poor ratings put the “Dark Monster Universe” program aborted.

Alex Kurtzman said: “This is probably the biggest failure of my life, both personally and professionally. People don’t learn anything from success, but failure can teach you to be a human being. I have almost a million regrets about this film. , the ‘brutal’ production was a valuable learning experience for me.”

Although “The Mummy‎” invested US$125 million and earned US$409 million at the global box office, it still lost US$95 million in terms of publicity expenses.

The key point is that the reputation of “The Mummy‎” is a mess, its 16% on Rotten Tomatoes and 5.4 points on IMDb.

Before the film was released, Universal Pictures tried to emulate Marvel Studios to create a “dark monster universe”, and the film’s headliner was “The Mummy‎”.

There were also plans for Johnny Depp to appear in “The Invisible Man‎” starring Javier Bardem in “Bride of Frankenstein‎” (with Angelina Jolie also rumored to be joining the cast).

Including Depp, Tom Cruise, Russell Crowe, Javier Bardem and others also took a group photo, but this universe currently only has “The Mummy‎” and the group photo.

Many years later, “The Invisible Man‎” gave up on asking Johnny Depp. Even though the promotional photos were taken, Universal still ruthlessly cut the budget of “The Invisible Man‎” to star Elisabeth Moss and directed by Leigh Whannell. The small and medium-sized production, but the reputation is quite good.

After “The Mummy‎” experienced word-of-mouth tragedy in 2017, “Variety” revealed that in addition to the inexperience of director Alex Kurtzman, the excessive control of the starring Tom Cruise also caused problems with the quality of the film.

According to reports at the time, Tom Cruise was the boss of the crew during the production of “The Mummy‎.”

Because director Alex Kurtzman was chosen by him, and since Kurtzman had never worked on a major commercial production before, Tom Cruise on the set of “The Mummy‎” was more of a real director.

Insiders told “Variety” that Tom Cruise often controls the filming of important action scenes, and he has the final say in the production details.

After Tom Cruise joined, he personally recruited Christopher McQuarrie and Dylan Kussman, who worked with him on “Reacher”, “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation‎” and other films to rewrite the script.

He made his character Nick Morton in the film more “Tom Cruise-like”, which is far from the setting of Nick Morton as a young man in the original script, and the rewritten script added Tom Cruise’s role as the chief mate. .

In the original script, Nick Morton and the mummy queen were split in half, but Nick Morton is the unshakable core of the story in the film after the release.

The new script also added a lot of strong dramatic plots to Tom Cruise. It is said that although Universal’s executives were not satisfied with this version of the script, they still agreed to shoot according to Tom Cruise’s vision.

Universal Pictures later denied that Tom Cruise had a negative impact on the production of “The Mummy‎”.