I was going to start this post off by saying, “poor Tom Cruise,” but then I thought about his life, his money, his fame, and I realized no one should ever feel bad for Cruise .
But still, he must feel a bit shi**y today. The reviews for Universal’s monster movie, The Mummy, are coming in, and they are brutal. Critics claim it’s the worst Tom Cruise film ever. It currently sits at 18% on Rotten Tomatoes. It has 119 rotten reviews and just 27 fresh reviews.
Sara Stewart from the New York Post wrote this in her review:
“It’s hard to tell if it’s Cruise or the dragging weight of the movie, but he’s almost totally devoid of the star power that makes the “Mission: Impossible” movies compulsively watchable.”
And J.R. Kinnard from PopMatters offered up this great line:
“A wise man once said, ‘Only a fool would make a campy horror movie into a serious drama.’ Actually, no one ever said that, but they should have, preferably on Tom Cruise’s voicemail.”
It’s also bad news at the box office for the film. It brought home around $2.7 million during its Thursday night preview, which is a terrible start, and puts it on track to be the lowest opening in The Mummy franchise. Experts believe it will make $30 million this weekend. That’s below 1999’s The Mummy and The Mummy Returns.
The one bit of good news is that the film is performing well internationally…
“It opened in an additional 33 markets on Thursday with strong results in both Russia ($1.6 million and 62 percent market share for the biggest Tom Cruise opening day ever) and Brazil ($526,000 for the biggest Tom Cruise opening day ever). It also opened in China Friday, with early results indicating an strong $18.7 million (127.4M RMB) opening day, which would also make the biggest opening for a Tom Cruise film in that market. Early total for the Wednesday and Thursday openers are landing at $20.5 million.”