Alex Kurtzman Assures Us That Making ‘The Mummy’ Was Every Bit as Awful as the Movie Itself

The body language on display in this picture speaks volumes about what the working relationship must have been like between Tom Cruise and The Mummy writer/director Alex Kurtzman. One of the most telling things about what it must have been like for Kurtzman to have suddenly found himself making a Tom Cruise movie can be found on the Blu-ray bonus features. Cruise, co-star Annabelle Wallis, and some cameramen head into the vomit comet to film the scene where they're flying around in a plane that's rapidly descending.

The film's director is nowhere to be found in this footage until the very end when he meets Cruise and company on the runway and Cruise assures him that they got some great footage. The star of the movie just told the director not to worry about a scene in the movie he's directing. Maybe Kurtzman gets terribly sick in a reduced gravity situation, but you should at least have him say that or something. As it plays out in the featurette, it looks like he was trusting his actor a bit too much.

While Kurtzman is enough of a professional not to lay any blame at Cruise's feet, he's happy to lay some at the feet of Universal Pictures in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter. The film had to have changed quite a bit when they signed the biggest star in the world, and ultimately it didn't meet with Kurtzman's original vision for the story, causing him to part ways with the studio's planned Dark Universe...

The Mummy wasn't what I wanted it to be. I'm no longer involved in that and have no idea what's going on with it. I look back on it now [and] what felt painful at the time ended up being an incredible blessing for me. I learned that I need to follow my own instincts, and when I can't fully do that, I don't think I can succeed. Those films are beautiful because the monsters are broken characters, and we see ourselves in them. I hope those are the movies that they make; I want to see them.

Universal put about fifteen carts in front of their horse on that whole debacle, and it's probably for the best that it's dead.