Abrams to help shepherd this current generation of Star Wars and has Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy overseeing the whole extended universe. DC’s latest wave of movies, including _ Wonder Woman, have Zack Snyder. For Marvel that’s studio president Kevin Feige. Shared cinematic universes require a lot of different directors and screenwriters working in consort by definition, but there’s almost always a central creative force making sure it all comes together. The idea that there was this much of a creative and leadership vacuum for Cruise to fill in the first place is sort of bonkers. This whole idea to reboot The Mummy franchise after just nine-years since the Brendan Fraser-starring version ended, and then build an ambitious and mega-expensive mega-franchise around it, existed before Cruise ever signed on. He’s Tom Cruise.īut lets not pretend this is all Tom Cruise’s idea. In fact, he may very well end up back in this same role in future movies in Universal’s Dark Universe franchise, as it looks like the movie’s international box office will help salvage the numbers. He’s still got those Mission: Impossible and Jack Reacher franchises to fall back on. If nothing else, at least he’ll be able to survive the disaster.
Yet, when Kurtzman proved out of his depth on the set of his first major blockbuster, it was Cruise who often stepped in as the real driver behind creative decisions. Though director Alex Kurtzman, a guy best known for his screenwriting work (with only a small-budget drama under his belt as a director), was already in consideration before Cruise came onboard, the story goes that Cruise approved him-Kurtzman had co-written the script for Mission: Impossible III, after all.
The result was he turned what should have been a universe-establishing horror-adventure movie into a weird approximation of your by now standard Tom Cruise movie. Per the gossip, he brought on his own screenwriters to rejigger the script (which resulted in a lessened focus on the actual mummy, and more focus on Cruise’s character), practically self-directed major action scenes, had input into the marketing, and even played a major part in choosing the high-profile June release date. According to the story, Universal Pictures offered Cruise an unusual amount of control in order to woo the star, and as a result, “several sources close to the production say that Cruise exerted nearly complete creative oversight on
According to the story, Universal Pictures offered Cruise an unusual amount of control in order to woo the star, and as a result, “several sources close to the production say that Cruise exerted nearly complete creative oversight on The Mummy The Mummy, essentially wearing all the hats and dictating even the smallest decisions on the set.”, essentially wearing all the hats and dictating even the smallest decisions on the set.”piece full of unnamed sources places much of the blame squarely on Cruise’s shoulders. Well, a juicy piece full of unnamed sources places much of the blame squarely on Cruise’s shoulders. Much of that talk has centered around a favorite Hollywood pastime: who to blame. You might have been able to hear the bones actually cracking if it hadn’t been drowned out by all the chatter around Hollywood that followed. The film that was supposed to kick off an ambitious shared cinematic universe full of classic movie monsters was both a critical and domestic box office flop. The Tom Cruise-starring The Mummy fell thudding into cinemas this weekend like, well, an actual corpse wrapped in tissue paper.