It feels like it’s been forever since the release of The Mummy starring Tom Cruise. At the time, the movie was something of a big deal, both because it was a reboot of the (mostly) beloved Brendan Fraser films that lots of us grew up with, and also because it was infamously planned to kickstart a Dark Universe featuring other Universal Monsters in the modern day. But instead, the Dark Universe would forever live on as a meme on Twitter while Universal later enlisted Blumhouse to just remake most of their monster movies as standalone films.
There hasn’t been much talk from anyone involved about their feelings on the film, mostly because several of them have gone on to do more interesting work, such as Sofia Boutella being the lead in Zack Snyder’s upcoming Rebel Moon or Jake Johnson becoming Spider-Man. But with The Mummy turning five years old this June, director Alex Kurtzman decided to express his thoughts about the film on an episode of the “Bingeworthy” podcast. Put bluntly, he called it “ffthe biggest failure of my life, both personally and professionally. There’s a million things I regret about it.”
The Mummy was Kurtzman’s second time directing a film, following 2012's People Like Us. But he’s been in the filmmaking business for decades and worked on plenty of...let’s call it divisive genre work in the recent decades, from Amazing Spider-Man to Michael Bay’s Transformers films and Sleepy Hollow. Compared to those, Mummy was “brutal” to work on and suffering from “too many cooks in the kitchen.” Following that film, he’s admitted that he’s now more willing to trust his gut. “When I have a feeling that doesn’t feel right, I am not quiet about it anymore...it’s not worth it to me.”
Since making that movie, Kurtzman has considered the movie a learning experience, one that “rebuilt me into a tougher person, and it also rebuilt me into a clearer filmmaker...I didn’t become a director until I made that movie.” While he hasn’t directed a film since, he has pivoted his focus entirely to television. He’s gone on to become a key creative in Star Trek’s TV resurgence for Paramount, including next month’s Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and he also serves as an executive producer on the new sci-fi series The Man Who Fell to Earth, premiering this evening on Showtime.
[via The Hollywood Reporter]
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