As you know, Universal dropped the first teaser trailer for The Mummy during last night’s episode of The Walking Dead. As you also probably know, the Tom Cruise-led thriller, which stars Sofia Boutella as the title character, is intended to welcome us to a “brand new world of gods and monsters.” That’s fancy trailer speak for a brand new interconnected universe involving Universal’s classic monsters library. If The Mummy works as intended next summer, it will kick off a new franchise centered on Dr. Jekyll (Russell Crowe), the Invisible Man (Johnny Depp), Dr. Frankenstein (possibly Javier Bardem) and other not-yet-cast classic Universal monsters like Dracula, the Bride of Frankenstein and the Wolfman.
Yes, The Mummy and the rest of the would-be franchise is Universal’s big “go” at an interconnected cinematic universe. Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t, but there is something that sticks out about this particular attempt compared to the would-be competition. Unlike rival studios’ attempts to fashion something along the lines of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this is almost risk-free for the distributing studio in question. Okay, yes, obviously if The Mummy is buried and the rest of the would-be monster movies remain untold, that will be an embarrassing black eye for Universal, the respective filmmakers and related investors. But Universal is so flush with A-level franchises right now that this “classic monsters” scheme is tantamount to playing for extra credit.
Okay, let’s play everyone’s favorite game, “Worst-Case Scenario Ball.” Let’s say that The Mummy is terrible, unpopular and a box office bomb. Let’s say that it’s no better than Dracula Untold (which, thanks to its removal from this new franchise, has been renamed “Dracula Nevermind”) and is no more successful. Sure, Dracula Untold made $217 million worldwide, but on a $70m budget. So, no one likes The Mummy, no one sees it, and the rest of the planned movies are buried alive. Sure, we all get to write “tsk-tsk” blog posts, and everyone looks silly, but the damage is minimal at worst. Because this franchise isn’t Universal’s “swing-for-the-fences” hope.
Universal is apparently only planning one of these a year. As such, the potential failure of this “monster squad” will be mitigated by the almost surefire success of everything else on Universal’s slate. If The Mummy crashes-and-burns next year, Universal will still have the surefire mega-successes of Fast 8 and Despicable Me 3, along with likely big wins like Fifty Shades Darker, The Wall and Pitch Perfect 3. Heck, even if The Mummy is a big hit, think around $450 million worldwide (Tom Cruise’s largest non-Mission: Impossible/War of the Worlds hit is The Last Samurai with $456m in 2003), it will probably end up ranked behind at least a couple of the above-noted likely smash hits.
If Johnny Depp’s The Invisible Man (unofficially planned for April 13, 2018) is unseen by moviegoers around the world, Illumination’s The Secret Life of Pets 2 and Illumination’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas will make up for it. Oh, and Jurassic World 2 will pitch in as well along with “hopefuls” like Fifty Shades Freed and Pacific Rim: 2. And whichever Universal monster movie drops in 2019 will be supported by How to Train Your Dragon 3 (remember, Comcast Corp. bought DreamWorks Animation) which just got moved to March 1, Fast 9, an Illumination movie and the year-end “gonna make all the money” Wicked adaptation. This “world of gods and monsters” franchise will neither make or break Universal in any given year.
Whether this reintroduction of the classic monsters works better than Van Helsing or The Wolfman or Dracula Untold (fourth time’s the charm?), it won’t be a make-or-break proposition for its respective studio like the DC Films franchise and/or Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them were for Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc. Heck, I’d argue it’s less risky than Paramount/Viacom Inc.’s Transformers spin-offs since said planned releases risk diluting their flagship $1 billion-a-pop franchise. Universal’s would-be stab at an interconnected universe exists as one relative risk in an ocean of sure things. It matters in that it's a new would-be franchise as Universal's older ones come to their natural ends, but it also has a huge safety net in the studio's other offerings. It’s the least risky “cinematic universe” around because it can afford to fail.
