Opening this upcoming weekend in theatres is The Mummy, hitting four thousand theatres across the United States and Canada. There is nothing wrong with that. Why not have a movie about a mummy? It has been a number of years since Brendan Fraser fought the ancient creature in what was a camp-filled action adventure. Studios are continuously re-trying cinematic outings, so why not try it again?
It is easy to see that 1999's outing was a success. It was the eighth highest domestic movie of the year, and scored the third highest opening weekend of 1999 with $43 million, coming in behind Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and Star Wars: Episode One - The Phantom Menace. It spawned a series of movies, one of which (The Scorpion King) is regarded by some to be the launching of Dwayne Johnson's career. When other properties have been re-created over a shorter period of time, it is not hard to believe that Universal would be looking to do with with The Mummy.
The problem here though is that this is not just the launch of a re-visited movie. It is the launch of what my podcast co-host, Christopher Spicer, calls a marketing pitch. Just imagine a corporate board room. The challenge laid ahead of the suits is to come up with an idea for making money. One person brings up the idea of bringing back movies from seventy years ago, and they swoon over the idea. They give the concept an idea and go to the boss with the pitch. The boss then says for them to take the pitch right to the public. Not the product, but the pitch.
This is what seems to have happened with Universal's Dark Universe. It is all about taking the likes of the Bride of Frankenstein, Phantom of the Opera, the Invisible Man, and others into movies and combining them to make a shared universe. Hey, a shared universe worked for one studio, so why not grab onto properties and make another one?
There are some who may have seen the trailer for the Dark Universe and got excited about it. However, this is something that should be approached with great skepticism. That board room pitch just got sold to us when it should have stayed within the company. People don't care about marketing ideas, they care about movies. First and foremost should be the idea of selling films to the public, not selling people a marketing ploy.
The timing for this is questionable. They launched the Dark Universe, along with its own website, ahead of the release of The Mummy. I honestly think this was a poor decision. What happens if, and it is quite possible, the film is a bomb? At the time of writing this, not a single critic on Rotten Tomatoes has seen the movie. Holding off on critical screenings is sometimes the sign that a movie is not that good. If they don't have faith in this movie standing up to the critics, why go ahead with marketing the Dark Universe right away. That being said, it still is Tuesday, so there are a few more nights to go that they could get advanced screenings in.
This is a realm that they have tried to enter already. Dracula Untold was seen to be the first movie in the recreation of the old Universal Monsters. That movie, however, was a bit of a dud. It didn't do well with the critics (getting only 23% on Rotten Tomatoes), and it wasn't gobbled up by movie goers. It made $23 million its opening weekend, and topped out domestically at $56 million. Universal had to rely heavily on the international box office to recoup money for this movie. All of a sudden the talk was that this wasn't meant to kick off the shared universe between Universal monsters. Instead, the studio would put that hope into the 2017 re-envisioning of The Mummy.
On the bright side, The Mummy does have Tom Cruise in it. That will help its chances, but as we saw with the $23 million opening of the Dwayne Johnson starring Baywatch and the similar opening of Cruise's latest, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, big stars aren't the drawing power that they once were. Having a mega-star in a film does not mean that it is going to do well, and against a budget of $125 million, The Mummy will have to do a lot better than Jack Reacher did to make it worth while. It most likely will, but right now it is tracking for an opening below $40 million, which would mean that, once again, Universal will have to hope on the overseas markets to make the movie profitable.
What Universal should be looking at, instead of any and all reasons to create a shared universe, is the properties that they can bring to the table. Just because you have something that can be intertwined doesn't mean that it is going to succeed. Forcing an entrance into a shared universe is not an easy task, as Warner Bros is figuring out with their DC properties.
Universal recently tried to bring back The Wolfman. Did they do this because they had a unique idea that pushed the concept forward or because it was a recognizable character? I don't know the answer to that. I do know the end result. It opened to $31 million, made a domestic total of near $62 million, and saw a global take of $139 million. It was a massive disappointment, as the production budget alone was $150 million. It was a resounding loss for Universal, and perhaps this is what they should be paying attention to right now.
It could be that the creatures that fascinated audiences in the past just aren't compatible for modern movie watchers. We have seen it before, we have been there and done that. There are lots of risks to bringing back old properties. It had better start off with a good story idea, because people won't go and see a movie just because it is recognizable. The same goes for a marketing strategy. Basing something solely off of the fact that people can recognize properties means nothing. There needs to be something to compel people to go to the theatre to see them.
It will be interesting to see how The Mummy does. I am a firm believer in believing that a story should be told because there is a creative idea behind it, not a marketing pitch. What works in the board room should stay in the board room. Don't sell pitches to the audience, sell inspired movies. This obsession with having a shared universe is not a solid starting point for making movies. This is a prime example of the business side of the industry, the side that doesn't think about stories but rather thinks about profits. If that's where they are coming from, that's alright and more power to them. The signs just aren't there that profits are what they will be seeing with this endeavour.
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