The Mummy (2017) is a reboot of a reboot of the Original Mummy franchise, started way back in 1932 with good old Boris Karloff as the titular mummy. For those who are unaware, the image that pops into your head when I write Frankenstein’s Monster, is Boris Karloff, that’s how old this is.

The Mummy Franchise was rebooted once before, back in 1999 as a Adventure-Action movie series, similar in nature and design to Indiana Jones, just without the hat and whip, the two first one were pretty solid action-adventure movies, with a fair amount of comedy and jokes, interspaced with perfectly decent action sequences, the third one was absolutely dreadful and killed off that franchise back in 2008.

However, Marvel’s Movie universe began taking off and somebody in the depth of horror that is Universal Studios marketing department went “hang on, we’ve got a whole mess of monsters, don’t we? Why not make a Universe out of them? A DARK UNIVERSE!”

They basically did a sort of alpha test of it with Dracula Unleashed, but it was frankly dreadfully boring, and even Universal realized that and downplayed the whole connection.

The big takeoff was supposed to be the 2017 rebooted “The Mummy”, starring Tom Cruise, Sofia Boutella as the Mummy and Russell Crowe as Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde. Tom Cruise? He stars as fucking Tom Cruise, the overwhelming domination that only Tom Cruise can do to a movie.

Sure, Tom Cruise is weird and probably not human, but he’s not that bad an actor at all, but this movie was called “The Mummy”, the focus ought to have been at least a little more on the Mummy, instead it was all about how Tom Cruise got superpowers and became Seth or something?

This was supposed to be a big franchise were the Mummy would have been part of it and they trap the Mummy at the end of the movie, she should have just vanished away or be temporarily sealed for some else to release later.

But nope, just Crowe hurling exposition about old nonsense and secret societies and then Cruise riding though the desert.

It killed the Dark Universe dead, the movie made about 400 million US$, the budget was around 125-195 million US$.

That may look like a success, but it isn’t, those figures don’t count marketing, add that to the total: 345 million US$, which is not enough to risk the establishment of a full franchise.

So the Dark Universe died before it basically started, there are still two other “Shared Universes” other than Marvels running: DC’s, of which only Wonder Woman and Aquaman are worth anything, and the Giant Monster thing with Godzilla and King Kong.

The DC movies have all but died and the last Godzilla didn’t do to well, we’ll see how Godzilla Vs King Kong will do.

These universes require a massive amount of work to ever get to work, but every single movie have to be good too and that’s a problem that Marvel have somehow managed to avoid so far.