Update: Tom Cruise and Universal are now denying that any deal is in place (via Deadline).
It’s Tom Cruise like you’ve never seen him before… punching the undead in the face (probably).
The Mission: Impossible star is currently in talks to headline Universal’s reboot of the popular The Mummy franchise, the first film in their planned “shared universe” of monster movies that would also include Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Dracula and more. Or rather, it’s the first film in the shared universe after Dracula Untold failed to excite audiences in 2014.
Or rather, it’ll be the first film in Universal’s shared universe after their original shared universe, in which all of the classic Universal monsters teamed up in the Abbot and Costello crossover movies in the 1950s.
In any case, Variety made the announcement, and although it seems like an odd choice for Tom Cruise – who only has a single horror movie to his credit, 1994’s Interview with a Vampire – it’s genre the actor has been circling for years now. He was attached to star in Guillermo Del Toro’s At the Mountains of Madness and the Van Helsing reboot, both for Universal, until those projects fell through several years ago.
Variety reports that the new The Mummy reboot will be set in the present day, just like Universal’s first version of The Mummy in 1932, but unlike the three Brendan Fraser movies that kept the series alive in the 1990s and 2000s. Star Trek Into Darkness co-writer Alex Kurtzman is set to direct, from a script by Prometheus co-writer Jon Spaihts.
The question of course is whether Cruise, whose only hit movies lately have been in the lucrative Mission: Impossible series, will be a hindrance to Universal’s franchise plans, or whether the popularity of these monsters will overcome an audience trepidation over seeing a Tom Cruise movie that doesn’t involve futuristic mask technology.
William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
