My thoughts on why 'the Mummy' failed to launch Dark Universe

[The Shape]

I'm still over here waiting for my Phantom of the Opera movie.

 

[Peyton Westlake]

I'm still over here waiting for my Phantom of the Opera movie.

I think even though the Phantom is considered by most not to be in the top 3 of Universal's monsters [not by me though] It would have been a bold move to use the Phantom as the launching point for their universe. He could be placed in a gothic/victorian setting and have the story acknowledge other characters. Universal did not have to tip their hand and advertise they were starting a universe. There wouldnt have been to much pressure for the Phantom to be a blockbuster right out of the gate & it could have just survived making a modest profit.

 

[Lighthouse]

Part of me really thought the Phantom was going to be the Perdi...the Perdigi..those guys' Q.

 

[Matt Mortem]

Luke Evans on Dracula in Universal's monster world :

http://sciencefiction.com/2017/10/17/dracula-untold-luke-evans-universal-dark-universe/

I'd gladly take Luke Evans back as Dracula, but he'd have to be a villain. I liked his casting, but I'm not fond of anti-hero Dracula, or anything like that. Dracula is a blood sucking monster. He's no friend.

 

[Peyton Westlake]

Part of me really thought the Phantom was going to be the Perdi...the Perdigi..those guys' Q.

I guess they went with Jekyll.
Frankly, the whole secret society dedicated to hunting supernatural threats is kind of weak.
Where have they been all this time anyway?

 

[jfurioso]

I'm still over here waiting for my Phantom of the Opera movie.

I thought Brian DePalma had already delivered on that.

 

[Peyton Westlake]

I thought Brian DePalma had already delivered on that.

 

[LaughterLives]

They should combine the character of the Phantom with Dracula and just bring back Luke Evans.
They should bring back Del Toro's Wolfman aswell. I just wanna see him on screen with Johnny Depp again.

 

[TheVileOne]

Not really the same thing, in any meaningful way. "The Mummy", in the iconic sense, is supposed to be an ancient Egyptian sorcerer-priest, cursed and entombed, awakened in the present day, etc.

Tom Cruise may have magic superpowers, but he's not The Mummy. That was Ahmanet. Who they killed off.

Well Cruise's character now has sorcerer priest powers. He's cursed and sorta undead walking around in the present day. He's the Mummy now

 

[Mysteryman]

Well Cruise's character now has sorcerer priest powers. He's cursed and sorta undead walking around in the present day. He's the Mummy now

Amhanet might be back.

 

[AndrewGilkison]

The MCU works because it had the advantage of decades of comic book history to build off of. Marvel was smart to make the Avengers the centerpiece of their MCU because that was the one big Marvel property that other studios hadn't made movies of yet, like they did with Spider-Man and X-Men. There was an excitement about seeing the Avengers for the first time. That is why it made billions at the box office.

Where was the pent up demand for the Universal Monsters to do the same thing? Does anyone really see a mass appeal for this?

 

[childeroland]

I think based on how the Dark Universe premiered here, there is a chance they hit the panic button already.
I hate to say this, and i don't mean to offend anyone, especially the female fans out there but...I think having the Mummy as a woman kind of hurt its chances for success.
Im not saying a female lead cant reap in the big bucks , because we saw what WW can do, but I think as an evil monster it kind of detracted from the lore of the mummy.
Having a mummy who is attractive and not gruesome is a weird idea to start off with.

She could have been a gruesome woman. Anyway, they should have made it more about her (like it was originally) and not just another Tom Cruise vehicle, and they shouldn't have spent a chunk of the film setting up a shared universe instead of tending to the current story. Crappy film-making did this thing in, not the mummy's gender, I think.

 

[TheVileOne]

Amhanet might be back.

I think this would-be franchise is off the table now. Bride of Frankenstein if it still happens probably won't have any connection to this film.

 

[jmc]

The MCU works because it had the advantage of decades of comic book history to build off of. Marvel was smart to make the Avengers the centerpiece of their MCU because that was the one big Marvel property that other studios hadn't made movies of yet, like they did with Spider-Man and X-Men. There was an excitement about seeing the Avengers for the first time. That is why it made billions at the box office.

Where was the pent up demand for the Universal Monsters to do the same thing? Does anyone really see a mass appeal for this?

To be fair was anyone really demanding the MCU before Iron Man outside of comic book fans? If anything Universal Monsters had a lot more going in its favour than what Marvel started out with, big name mythical creatures and cinema history for one. If anything Universal should have had an easier time developing Dark Universe because they had two examples of shared universes to reference, and should have learned the lessons from each.

The idea wasn't the problem, in fact I'd argue now was the right time to revive the concept, the problem was they put the cart before the horse, built a universe on bad foundations and tried to force the idea onto people, promoting an A-list cast and promising a big team up film before the first movie was even released. The Mummy needed to be a better film of course also, there's a much better film lurking under the surface there, but they also needed to handle this universe more organically.

 

[TheVileOne]

I think studios need to go back to focusing on just making that one movie. And if it does well, go from there. Stop trying to force sequels, franchises, and shared universes to happen before the first one even gets off the ground and strikes a chord.

 

[AndrewGilkison]

To be fair was anyone really demanding the MCU before Iron Man outside of comic book fans? If anything Universal Monsters had a lot more going in its favour than what Marvel started out with, big name mythical creatures and cinema history for one. If anything Universal should have had an easier time developing Dark Universe because they had two examples of shared universes to reference, and should have learned the lessons from each.

The idea wasn't the problem, in fact I'd argue now was the right time to revive the concept, the problem was they put the cart before the horse, built a universe on bad foundations and tried to force the idea onto people, promoting an A-list cast and promising a big team up film before the first movie was even released. The Mummy needed to be a better film of course also, there's a much better film lurking under the surface there, but they also needed to handle this universe more organically.

I think the Avengers characters were more relevant to the public when the MCU first started because of video games like Ultimate Alliance or animated DTV movies or comic book stories like the Ultimates and Civil War that got massive mainstream publicity when they came out. Go back to the mid-2000's, and you can see characters like Iron Man and Captain America and Thor were starting to get more visibility in comics and other media before their movies cemented them for good. Even then, Marvel still put everything into that first Iron Man movie before they went too far into universe building.

The Universal Monsters feel old and antiquated, mostly because they haven't been kept in the public consciousness. This is why they can't promise a team up and a cinematic universe and have us care. Why should we care? These characters haven't been relevant in a long time so why should I care about seeing rebooted versions of them team up, especially when the big team up and shared universe concept has already been done by Marvel? The whole thing just comes off like a desperate money grab.

 

[jmc]

I was actually thinking about The Mummy recently after having finally watched it and thinking how much better the movie would have been had Ahmanet been portrayed as a sympathetic character, something like her being a simple servant girl who through no fault of her own was cursed and buried alive for having a love affair with the prince of Egypt. She wakes up several thousands of years later looking for her lost love and causes death mayhem from all her pain and anger.

 

[jmc]

I think the Avengers characters were more relevant to the public when the MCU first started because of video games like Ultimate Alliance or animated DTV movies or comic book stories like the Ultimates and Civil War that got massive mainstream publicity when they came out. Go back to the mid-2000's, and you can see characters like Iron Man and Captain America and Thor were starting to get more visibility in comics and other media before their movies cemented them for good. Even then, Marvel still put everything into that first Iron Man movie before they went too far into universe building.

The Universal Monsters feel old and antiquated, mostly because they haven't been kept in the public consciousness. This is why they can't promise a team up and a cinematic universe and have us care. Why should we care? These characters haven't been relevant in a long time so why should I care about seeing rebooted versions of them team up, especially when the big team up and shared universe concept has already been done by Marvel? The whole thing just comes off like a desperate money grab.

Because there's no reason you can't make them relevant again. You've got to first make people care about the characters, if you can do that they'll buy into the concept. Marvel's success in large comes from them ensuring the audiences likes their characters. If it were just about visibility then the DC films would have been a bigger success than what they have been, but they're not mostly because the only character people genuinely like is Wonder Woman.

Character building is not something that's exclusive to Marvel. The problem with the Dark Universe is they didn't give us character to care about. As I said above, they should have made Ahmanet something like a tragic character, get people invested in her and not try to make it just another Tom Cruise movie. I'm willing to bet had that happened things would be moving forward with the new Universal Monsters.

 

[JtheDreamer]

I was actually thinking about The Mummy recently after having finally watched it and thinking how much better the movie would have been had Ahmanet been portrayed as a sympathetic character, something like her being a simple servant girl who through no fault of her own was cursed and buried alive for having a love affair with the prince of Egypt. She wakes up several thousands of years later looking for her lost love and causes death mayhem from all her pain and anger.

My whole thing was:

1. They decide to go with the female Mummy to differentiate from the other films and to (let's face it) ride the wave of "females can play villains too!" - then they go and pass her powers off to a male character
2. She wasn't threatening at all

 

[Jochimus]

I think studios need to go back to focusing on just making that one movie. And if it does well, go from there. Stop trying to force sequels, franchises, and shared universes to happen before the first one even gets off the ground and strikes a chord.

This, honestly.

The more cynical side of me would like to think that it might have made a difference if, instead of going back to a particular monster well that's already been revisited within the past several decades either by Universal or some other studio - because we've had plenty of vampires and werewolves in the interim, a few Frankensteins and a couple invisible men - Universal had finally crapped out that Gill-Man remake they've been trying to pinch off since the early '80s.

 

[TheVileOne]

My whole thing was:

1. They decide to go with the female Mummy to differentiate from the other films and to (let's face it) ride the wave of "females can play villains too!" - then they go and pass her powers off to a male character
2. She wasn't threatening at all

I definitely agree. They didn't seem to commit to the idea of the female mummy at the end.

 

[chaseter]

Why did the Mummy have two pupils in each eye if Set lived in the dagger? I can see the point of Cruise having the duplicity of good vs evil but why the Mummy?

 

[TheVileOne]

I didn't even know that's what the double eye thing meant. I just thought it was mean to make Ahmanet look creepier and more deadly.

 

[Milk Tray Guy]

If they'd carried on with the starting point of the original concept with Dracula Untold which pretty much gave the entire universe it's first footing then you could have built solidly around that, instead they want Hollywood Razzmatazz BS gloss with Cruise giving it full grin and you lose the realism that Untold gave the platform from which to build from. They chose to ignore all that and give us bog standard 'thrills'.

I watched Dracula Untold for the first time tonight and quite liked it. Any idea why they scrubbed that as the start of their monster universe? It didn't exactly do terribly box office-wise ($217.1 million against a $70 million budget apparently).

I'd gladly take Luke Evans back as Dracula, but he'd have to be a villain. I liked his casting, but I'm not fond of anti-hero Dracula, or anything like that. Dracula is a blood sucking monster. He's no friend.

I liked Evans' casting as well but I agree with that.

 

[Drizzle]

I watched Dracula Untold for the first time tonight and quite liked it. Any idea why they scrubbed that as the start of their monster universe? It didn't exactly do terribly box office-wise ($217.1 million against a $70 million budget apparently).

I don't think Universal was pleased with the reception to Dracula Untold. Go figure the reception for The Mummy would be even worse.

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