Stills from The New Mummy
Time Network News Recently, "New Mummy" director Alex Kurzman said when promoting the new drama "Alien Guest" that the film in 2017 was the biggest failure of his personal and even professional life. The film, starring Tom Cruise, cost Universal $95 million, and the poor ratings directly aborted the Dark Monster Universe project.
Alex Kurtzman said: "This is probably the biggest failure of my life, both personally and professionally. People can't learn anything from success, but failure can teach you to be human. I have almost 1 million regrets about this film, and the "cruel" production has been a valuable learning experience for me. ”
Atango and Alex Kuzman
Although "The New Mummy" invested $125 million to get $409 million at the global box office, it still cost Global $95 million in publicity fees. The key is that the film's reputation can be described as a mess, with a score of 16% on Rotten Tomatoes and 5.4 on IMDb.
Before the release of the film, Universal Studios tried to emulate Marvel Studios to create a "dark monster universe", and the first cannon of the film was "The New Mummy". It was also planned that Johnny Depp would star in "The Invisible Man" in Javier Baden's "The Bride of Frankenstein" (Angelina Jolie was rumored to join).
Once the "Dark Monster Universe" project
Depp, Atango, Russell Crowe, Javier Baden and others also took a group photo, but the universe is currently only left with the "New Mummy" and the group photo.
Many years later, "Invisible Man" gave up on Johnny Depp, even if the promotional photos were taken, Universal still ruthlessly reduced the budget of "Invisible Man" and changed it to a small and medium-sized production starring Elizabeth Moss and directed by Ray Werner, which was quite good.
After "The New Mummy" experienced a word-of-mouth tragedy in 2017, "Variety" revealed that in addition to the inexperienced director Alex Kurtzman, the excessive control of the lead actor 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 New Mummy. Because the director Alex Kuzman was chosen by him, and because Kuzman had never worked on a commercial production before, Atango on the set of "The New Mummy" was more like a real director. Insiders revealed to the reporter of "Variety" that Brother Tang often controls the shooting of important action scenes, and the production details will be decided by him.
After Atango joined, he personally recruited Christopher McCauley and Dylan Kusman, who had worked with him on "Jack the Hero" and "Mission Impossible 5" and other films, to rewrite the script, and portrayed his role in the film Nick Morton as more "Tom Cruise Fan", which is far from the original script's setting that Morton is a young man.
At the same time, the rewritten script increased the number of scenes of Brother Tang. In the original script, Morton and the Mummified Queen's role was five or five, and after the release of the film, Morton was the unshakable core of the story. The new script also added a lot of strong dramatization of the evil spirit possession to Brother Tang, and it is said that although the top management of Universal was not satisfied with this version of the script, they still agreed to shoot according to Brother Tang's vision.
Universal later stated that Tom Cruise had a negative impact on the production of The New Mummy.