“The Mummy” proved to be dead on arrival back in 2017. Director Alex Kurtzman seemingly fell into the trap of franchise moviemaking by paying far too much attention to establishing future entries rather than making his own film worth watching. Today, “The Mummy” bears a lowly 15% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, where reviewers threw around phrases like “one of the year’s worst films,” “a mess of bones, bandages, and bald commercial cynicism,” and “feels less like a movie than a series of compromises worked out by a corporate committee.” In other words, critics really didn’t like “The Mummy,” and it quickly became infamous for embracing the worst impulses of franchise moviemaking — a lesson in how not to establish a shared universe in the wake of Marvel’s dominance. It also made just $409 million on a $195 million budget, which, if you know how the box office actually works, is far from what Universal was hoping for.
Now, though, HBO Max subscribers are apparently intent to prove we all missed something when “The Mummy” debuted and have exhumed the corpse of this long dead misfire, propping it up in the streamer’s charts.
