Universal pinned a lot of hope on their 2017 reboot of The Mummy (watch it HERE). That movie was supposed to be a franchise starter, the beginning of the Dark Universe, a series of revivals of Universal Monsters properties that would all be connected to each other. It did pretty well at the box office, pulling it over $409 million worldwide… but Universal had pumped so much money into it, a haul of $409 million was considered a disappointment. That, combined with the film’s negative reception (it only scored 16% on Rotten Tomatoes), caused the studio to scrap their Dark Universe plans. The Mummy director Alex Kurtzman was, along with Chris Morgan, one of the heads of the Dark Universe endeavor, and during a new interview with The Playlist he called the film the biggest failure of his life.
Kurtzman has been doing press for the Showtime series The Man Who Fell to Earth, inspired by the Walter Tevis novel and a follow-up to the 1976 film starring David Bowie. Kurtzman created the show with Jenny Lumet, who was one of the many writers who worked on The Mummy, and since the fifth anniversary of that film is coming up The Playlist asked Kurtzman and Lumet to reflect on the experience of working on it.
Lumet answered first, saying,
That experience, I found it so valuable. I had never written a very, very big movie, and I think that it’s important to know how to do all the things. So I learned how to do a thing. And I am forever grateful for that experience. It was movie-making on an enormous scale. I don’t think that I could be here now without that experience.”
Then Kurtzman said,
I tend to subscribe to the point of view that you learn nothing from your successes and you learn everything from your failures. And that was probably the biggest failure of my life, both personally and professionally. There’s about a million things I regret about it, but it also gave me so many gifts that are inexpressibly beautiful. I didn’t become a director until I made that movie, and it wasn’t because it was well directed. It was because it wasn’t. And I would not have understood many of the things that I now understand about what it means to be a director had I not gone through that experience. And as brutal as it was in many ways, and as many cooks in the kitchen as there were, I am very grateful for the opportunity to make those mistakes because it rebuilt me into a tougher person, and it also rebuilt me into a clearer filmmaker. That has been a real gift, and I feel those gifts all the time because I’m very clear now when I have a feeling that doesn’t feel right. I am not quiet about it anymore. I will literally not proceed when I feel that feeling. It’s not worth it to me. And you can’t get to that place of gratitude until you’ve had that kind of experience. Look, if you look at history and you look at people who’ve made amazing things, every single one of them will tell you the same story, which is that it came after a failure. So I look back on it now with gratitude. It took me a while to get there, but my life is better for it.”
Kurtzman directed The Mummy from a script that was credited to David Koepp, Christopher McQuarrie, and Dylan Kussman (with himself, Lumet, and Jon Spaihts receiving story credit). The film has the following synopsis:
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.
From the sweeping sands of the Middle East through hidden labyrinths under modern-day London, The Mummy brings a surprising intensity and balance of wonder and thrills in an imaginative new take that ushers in a new world of gods and monsters.
Tom Cruise, Annabelle Wallis, Sofia Boutella, Jake Johnson, Courtney B. Vance, Marwan Kenzari, Javier Botet, and Russell Crowe star.
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