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Summary: Thought safely entombed in a crypt deep beneath the unforgiving desert, an ancient queen whose destiny was unjustly taken from her is awakened in our current day, bringing with her malevolence grown over millennia and terrors that defy human comprehension.

Directors: Alex Kurtzman

Writers: David Koepp, Christopher McQuarrie, Dylan Kussman

Cast:

• Tom Cruise as Nick Morton

• Sofia Boutella as Princess Ahmanet / The Mummy

• Annabelle Wallis as Jenny Halsey

• Jake Johnson as Sergeant Chris Vail

• Courtney B. Vance as Colonel Greenway

• Marwan Kenzari as Malik

• Russell Crowe as Dr. Henry Jekyll

• Javier Botet as Set

• Selva Rasalingam as King Menehptre

• Dylan Smith as Lorenzo Montanari

• Rez Kempton as Foreman

• Chasty Ballesteros as Kira Lee

• Brendan Fraiser as Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Film

Rotten Tomatoes: 23%

Metacritic: 34/100

After Credits Scene? No

I don’t want any problems but I enjoyed The Mummy 2017. It kept me interested all the way through and I couldn’t completely guess where they were going. I didn’t go into it with the expectation for it to be a remake of the older movies.

Spoilers Ahead: Nick (Tom Cruise) not being the straight-laced, good guy and his banter with Vail (Jake Johnson) was entertaining.

There were some different shots that I haven’t necessarily seen in media like the plane going down and the mummies swimming under water.

I appreciated that Nick had to become powerful enough to stop Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella) I’m so used to movies where a human stops/kills a supernatural creature with human abilities that this movie gets props for doing something different.

Where is the sequel?? I want to know what’s going on with Nick and his new powers.

I watched it because I was curious about how Universal wanted to start off their ''Dark Universe''. But now I know why it failed. This movie is a pile of garbage.

This was Universal's second attempt at a cinematic universe. Their other one was with Dracula Untold in 2014. I think the problem with The Mummy 2017 and also Dracula Untold is that they're trying to turn these monsters into superheroes. They're not staying true to these characters.

Another reason I watched The Mummy 2017 is because I'm a fan of Brendan Fraser's ''The Mummy'' from 1999 and ''The Mummy Returns. I love those movies. I've watched them many times. When my cable went out a long time ago I used to put on these movies just to help me fall asleep. But ''The Mummy'' 2017 is a movie I would never watch over and over again. It doesn't have the charm.

I want details, everything, I want to know why people didn't go to see it and why those who watched didn't like it

Alright, I know. By all observable metrics, The Mummy's reboot with Tom Cruise is easily one of the worst-received Tom Cruise vehicles ever, with a sad 34 metascore rating and drowning just under the average user score at 4.7 out of 10. Most people think it just fucking stinks.

As a huge schlocky horror enthusiast, I always veered off The Mummy 2017 as I assumed it would land square in the "bad BAD movies", as opposed to "good bad movies", which I love to death (my Ninja : Silent Assassin 4K restoration is a prized possession). But I recently played through WayForward's metroidvania take on this ill-fated reboot. In case you don't know, like most human beings alive, WayForward was hired by Universal to adapt The Mummy however they wanted - both companies already collaborated on the DS port of Despicable Me The Game, out of all things, and trusted one another.

Universal let WayForward reinterpret The Mummy by yeeting Tom Cruise away and focusing on Prodigium, the generic organization keeping watch over magical artifacts all over the globe. You play a soldier, you explore the english countryside looking for Princess Ahmanet (our titular bandaged beguiling babe) and fighting giant locusts until you die. You then play ANOTHER Prodigium soldier and must kill your former player character to get your stuff back. It's a fun mix between Super Metroid and Dark Souls. It kinda rips, actually, as a five-hours long homage to the nineties.

So I watched The Mummy 2017. It wasn't good. Russell Crowe plays a dumb Mr. Jekyll and chews the scenery with bad CGI veins bulging through his skin, characters routinely ignore deadly infections necrotizing half their colleague's face, scriptwriters give up at the 30-minutes mark and teleport the protagonists to England all the way from Irak (in a most literal sense), Universal desperately pushes their dumb little shared universe throughout the movie and Tom Cruise keeps enacting cliché actions scenes. Tom runs away ! Tom drives a silly car ! Tom fights his way through CGI ghouls ! Tom is so fucking hot an undead princess has the hots for him ! It's not good at all !

But weirdly enough, it's not bad either. Alex Kurtzmann's direction is terrible, admittedly, feeling completely overtaking by his huge prestigious actors and his very own script. That last point must be stressed. Tom Cruise plays a dastardly tomb raider who actually has very little morals, short of actually letting people die. He fucks an archeologist just to steal her maps and go pillage some artifacts. He's tagged as "absolute evil" by Ahmanet. He's an absolute, unrepentant scoundrel ! Ahmanet gets injected with mercury so she can be vivisected ! The mummy can summon hordes of english crusaders to annihilate London ! Russell Crowe gets insane as Dr. Jekyll ! (although casting Nicolas Cage instead would certainly help in that particular instance)

Why did The Mummy 2017 get torn apart by critics and viewers alike ? I think, back in thr day, people secretly hated the shared universe trend - critics especially, which were getting sick of filler Marvel movies, but couldn't actually give them abyssal ratings because the rabid fandom would tear them apart. This isn't a conspiracy theory. Professional critics admitted they inflated their Marvel reviews and handwaved them away just so they could cash their check without getting harassed by parasocial lunatics insisting that Captain Marvel was a daring feminist manifesto in a sea of testosterone-filled actioners. I don't want to demean another movie just to make my point. But for every "dull ass sleepy movie" review I catch on Letterboxd, accusing The Mummy of being the most boring succession of images since that paint-drying movie sent to british censors as a practical joke, I see a thousand shining (or tolerant) reviews of similarly unambitious studio flicks for reasons I can't quite grasp.

So, no, The Mummy 2017 isn't great - it's squarely average in the worst sense of the term. But I sincerely believe its shared universe ambitions brought it down for the silliest of reasons. Everyone saw a good punching bag and let their steam off. Ironically, phase 4 and 5 MCU movies would also stray aimlessly - a criticism very often leveled at The Mummy, but in far more tepid hit pieces and Metacritic scores, except for a few truly terrible outliers. Like, if anyone tries to tell me Shang-Chi isn't as wildly incoherent, actor-driven and franchise-beholden as The Mummy, I'll just laugh. Because it's not true. Shang-Chi has a decent action director and actual fight choreography, but the core of the movie falls apart just as readily as a pure studio product.

It's just a slightly better-made product.

TL;DR : The Mummy 2017 isn't good, direction is too bland to elevate the bonkers script, but all the ingredients were there and critics savaged it because they hated the shared universe concept at that point, but MCU was still untouchable.

The Mummy (2017) genuinely pissed me off. It had all the ingredients an ancient curse, a badass villain, the return of a classic horror icon and still managed to be a soulless, studio-dictated mess. It was less a movie and more a checklist for launching a “Dark Universe” no one asked for.

Tom Cruise? Wrong fit. He's too polished for a movie that should’ve been gritty, eerie, and unpredictable. Sofia Boutella as Ahmanet had serious potential, but the movie treated her like set dressing. She was supposed to be terrifying and tragic she ended up being a plot device with eyeliner.

If I were rewriting it:

Focus entirely on Ahmanet’s story. Let her be the center. Give her real emotion, menace, and tragedy not just backstory in a 2-minute flashback.

Ditch the cinematic universe nonsense. This should’ve been a slow-burn horror adventure, not a Marvel-lite monster launchpad.

Cast someone who can play scared. Give us a protagonist who feels in over their head, not someone who's already acting like he has sequel immunity.

Drop the action bloat. Bring back dread. Let silence, shadows, and ancient curses do the heavy lifting not sandstorms and plane crashes.

There was a genuinely good horror movie buried in there. Universal just didn’t have the guts to commit to it.

What would you change if you had the script in your hands?

Have you noticed how this $125–195 doesn't really have any major pay off? Like no real CGI extravaganza, with bombastic effects, no final battle? But at the same time its not a dark somber thriller on the verges of horror, and also its not really a an action-adventure with funny quips. Its also not a low-mid budget monster hunting action-thriller.

You know I will never understand how a big Hollywood studio lets itself fall into obvious traps that us common people can see from a mile away, I mean this movie is an obviously rushed Frankenstein monster, you can clearly see that. It starts with an action-adventure vibe with jokes and snarky characters, then it suddenly turns into a pg-13 horror-thriller and then to a monster horror then into a disaster movie and then into some kind of dark drama but then comes back into the same beginning with jokes and quips. I can easily imagine producers telling the writers "Just make it happen, the charts say people want this, this and this! Don't worry about it, they will eat it up and we will snort mountains of cocaine".

I mean, at the end I was like "Wait I thought Tom Cruise is the Lucifer and the comedy relief guy is a cursed ghost or something in his mind, but now they are fucking around the desert again and joking around, and they use horses?

Honestly what a fucking missed opportunity, Sofia Boutella and Russel Crowe were amazing and the movie at a few fleeting moments managed to establish some important things for the Dark Universe like : atmosphere, visual identity, connected universe that does not feel forced and memorable characters. However Tom Cruise's character or the blonde woman's were not integral to any of them.

Yet despite all this, I do not hate the movie and again critics and some youtube personalities pissed me off since they lowered my expectations beyond belief with their comments, why does everything have to be so polarizing nowadays...

Apologies if this is done wrong as it is my first post here but thought this couldn't be passed over as I love redditors getting into shitfights over the most low stakes shit of all time.

The original post states that The Mummy (2017) which was infamously a flop would have been better if it wasn't marketed as a remake to which one user correctly points out that it was never marketed as a remake. It was always marketed as a new franchise. What the fuck are you even talking about?

Another user who isn't OP but clearly made the same assumption then responds to this comment which is where the drama begins to unfold and we see many exchanges with this person and other users trying to explain why The Mummy (2017) isn't a remake, but this one pretty much sums it up:

I'm confused. Are you saying I'm wrong because it's a brand new unrelated IP or are you saying it's a remake/reboot?

I’m saying you’re wrong because even though they use the same old monster for inspiration, they clearly have nothing to do with each other.

The same way that even though Scooby Doo teamed up with Batman to fight the joker in the 80s, and Batman fought the joker in the Dark Knight, and both movies were made by Warner Brothers, it does not mean that the Dark Knight is a remake/reboot of Scooby Doo Meets Batman.

Does that clear things up, or are you still confused?

It's the same fucking Joker regardless of whether he's fighting Batman or the Scooby Gang. God this subreddit is so pretentious.

Then they come dangerously close to understanding everyone else's point:

Do you think every Dracula movie is a remake of every other Dracula movie? .

Well no, because Dracula is in the public domain.

... So is the Mummy?

God people on this sub are SO FUCKING ANNOYING AND PRETENTIOUS. Are you proud of being "right"? Do you get a gold star? Do you want a cookie ?

Would you say Disney's new Snow White is not a fucking remake?

The rest of the thread is just people repeatedly trying to use similar points to make the user understand why The Mummy (2017) isn't a remake despite being the same IP.

I saw this on release, and watched it again last night - it was a fun action/ horror movie, some very good set pieces (the plane crash alone was awesome), as well as a good turn by Russell Crowe too.

I would have liked to have seen where the 'Dark Universe' led with this as the basis, and now that's all gone. I still don't get what was so bad about the movie generally.

EDIT: To save you time, 'Yes' doesn't really go anywhere.

Just watched this movie again and I don't understand why it flopped and has 15% score on RT. It's a fun modern take on the originals, not as heavy on the adventure aspect sadly, but overall a fun new twist and very enjoyable. One of Cruise's more fun characters, and Sofia Boutella as the Mummy is awesome.

Why is it all but forgotten?

I guess that many people here know the whole "If Indiana Jones died in raiders of the lost Arc, the ending would be the same: Nazis open the ark and FUCKING DIE" it's the same principle.

Ahmanet main's plan was to stab Morton with that dagger, and awaken Seth with that. But we all that how the film ends: he stabs the dagger on himself, gains seth power, resists, and kills the Mummy.

See how's that a dumb plot? The Villain will never win, because no matter the circunstances, Ahmanet would NEVER win.

1. If the stone was aready attached on her first try to stab Morton, he would become Seth, see Jenny, and come back to his senses.

2.If they just went with Henry's plan, Morton would be stabbed, become Set, be able to control his impulses then kill Ahmanet.

See how that's conplete shit?

Alao, i'd prefer the undead chick.

So I recently rewatched all of the Mummy movies starting with the magnificent Brenden Frasier 1999 masterpiece of adventure cinema, after which all things go downhill. And I decided to rewatch the 2017 Tom Cruise led reboot/stealth sequel. 

As I watched it I realized it was close to greatness, but had just enough wrong with it to warrant that 15% Rotten Tomatoes score. This doomed the movie's financial performance and doomed the planned Dark Universe franchise they hoped would rival the Avengers films. Yeah, this was no Iron Man. The director said it was his biggest failure as a film maker and Brenden Frasier commented that it failed because of it's lack of "fun", which I agree with.

But it had enough in it that I liked which made wish it could be saved. 

So, pros and cons (strictly my opinion) 

Pros:

- Great set design

- A perfectly reasonable core plot

- Eerie vibes in places

- Some really good casting

- Fun undead side character

- Decent world building and franchise bait

- An *almost* compelling main character

Cons:

- really bad dialog in many places

- clunky/inconsistent characters

- an uninteresting antagonist

- weird directorial choices/editing choices

- a lackluster climax

- crappy romance subplot

- uninteresting score 

So how could it have been fixed? 

Two main issues could be fixed to make the movie acceptable. Bring from a 3/10 to a 6/10 kind of thing. 

1. Fixing the uninteresting antagonist - Ahmanet as the main Mummy of this Mummy movie wasn't bad on paper, but she wasn't interesting enough. She had room for depth in her backstory but takes a backseat most of the movie to Tom Cruise running from things. In my opinion I believe the best way to fix her would be to expand her backstory a little bit so that she's not just trying to bring Set, god the underworld, into reality for a good ol' apocalypse and have her actually being host to a god herself, a mate of Set who seeks to bring him back because he is the source of her power and only together are the two at full power. From there, we would need more expansion on this dichotomy between this human and the goddess and show them as two separate characters who both work in tandem and clash a little. This would bolster the idea at the end of Tom Cruise's character taking on the spirit of Set and showing what he could be like sharing a body with a god going forward.

Give her more scenes, set her up as more of a threat, and then just make her *scarier*. Introduce some side characters and then have her brutally kill them half way through.

Another recommendation for this, change the actress. She had the look but she was too pretty. Get someone older, more queen-ly, and, if you'll pardon the expression, bigger mommy vibes. Likewise don't have her regenerate so quickly and keep her a little gross and undead.

2. Scrapping the romance subplot for something more substantial - this was big ol beef for me. Oh, you guys met off screen, have a one night stand offscreen, and he stole something off screen, now lets transition into building a relationship, where, over the course of two days she's convinced you're a good man and you're willing to embody the god of death to bring her back to life? Yeah, ok.

I believe the answer to this would be make the female lead, Annabelle Wallis's Dr. Jenny Halsey, and make her the sister to Tom Cruise's protagonist Nick Morton (I'd also change his name to something better, because it's so bland). This way, at the beginning of the film you could set it up where she's the archeologist and she's in the area so she and her brother, on deployment, get dinner or something and that's when he steals the information about the tomb. The relationship has more gravitas, more weight, and doesn't seem as contrived as a whirlwind 3 day romance and makes the pushes made by one to be better and the sacrifices made the other to actually make sense.

Those two changes could have saved the movie from total failure and into "it was ok." territory. But could have made it really good?

My suggestions:

1. More side characters - there are literally 3 main character and 2 side characters in the entire movie. That's it. Jake Johnson's undead specter of Vail is a great addition and should have been used more. Russel Crow was a lot of fun and Jekyll and Hyde (more on that later). But more was needed. Give Jenny (now Nick's sister) a husband or boyfriend who is just a good man and supportive and kill him off gloriously. Give Jekyll an assistant or two, perhaps some sort of Prodigium agent who is a total bad ass and someone more nerdy and intellectual and can spout exposition. Make them likable and then give them stakes. Perhaps add it an extra archeologist as a side antagonist who wants the power for themselves, and so on.

2. Fix Jekyll and Hyde - I loved the inclusion of Jekyll as the Nick Fury of this universe, but the nature of his character his laid on too quickly and too fast, with him constantly freaking out and injecting himself with stuff. It was too much. But his going all Hyde was cool and this would be easy to fix. Don't introduce him as Jekyll, just keep him "Henry" and then, as Ahmunet breaks free, have the stress of that situation begin to eat at him and almost force Hyde out. He tries to go for his suppressant but can't make it. And boom, there's your Hyde.

3. Show Nick's willpower - this was a big part of the ending but it was almost totally unearned. You see glimpses in the big stunt moments, like when he's able to put the parachute on Jenny, swim to save her, and so on, but it needs to be more front and center that this man, though morally dubious and perhaps mentally fractured, is unmovable when he has a goal. And Tom Cruise can do that, I saw the first Jack Reacher movie!

4. Make the ending more exiting - It needed to be big and more bombastic, with Nick showing off that he's a Force Recon Marine and that Mummy bitch just killed his sister! Give him a shotgun and have him (and perhaps one of those side characters I mentioned) go whole ham on undead knights and zombie cops to get to Ahmunet. Make the ending feel *earned*.

5. Music - I can't remember the music to this movie at all and I just finished it an hour ago. But I can still hum the music to the 1999 Mummy. And while it's not always fair to compare a movie and it's remake, this isn't a remake, it's a sequel and they made that clear (Book of the Living and the sand wall face, etc.) It has a legacy to live up to and it needed to be a little bombastic and a little harking back to simpler times.

6. A whole different editor. That ending was really awkward and didn't need to be.

I have more thoughts but I need to be done with this before I end up writing an entire script out of frustration. I just feel like there was so much good here. Cruise was a decently strong lead (but i have a soft spot, I like most of his movies). The sets and such were so good! I loved that tomb and the whole Prodigium set piece! The underwater mummies and the final battle area place. The simple yet effective plot that sets up a fascinating future that we'll now never see. Oh well.

I love a lot about it. I love thirteen ghosts, ghost ship, the haunting, invisible man. It just seems very similar to those I love. Real sets. Great monsters.

Sure some hate Tom Cruise but that can't be the whole reason.

Russel Crowe plays Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde. If Dr Jelyll goes without his shot for some amount of time he turns into Mr Hyde, a scenario so devastating they have a lockdown procedure. Despite this inconvenience (this situation occurs every hour or so) , Dr Jekyll absolutely does not preload his shot or give himself any cushion with which to administer it. Instead, he waits until the last moment to begin loading the complicated shot-a timeline so tights that a five second delay causes unstoppable chaos. It’s not reasonable that a the head of his organization (a doctor and lawyer) is this disorganized and/or risky.