Tom Cruise’s Infamous Horror Reboot With 15% RT Score Climbing Streaming Charts 7 Years Later

Despite leaving critics and audiences underwhelmed at the time, Tom Cruise’s The Mummy reboot is climbing the streaming charts. Cruise starred in the 2017 movie as a U.S. Army Sergeant who inadvertently awakens a cursed Egyptian princess and becomes the target of her search for a host for the deity Set in the hopes of claiming rulership of the world. Intended to launch an interconnected franchise known as the Dark Universe, the movie was a critical and commercial failure, losing Universal Pictures a reported $60-95 million at the box office and leading to the shelving of the franchise.
Now, seven years later, though, Cruise’s The Mummy is starting to find success on Peacock. At the time of writing, the 2017 horror reboot holds the No. 3 spot on the platform’s Top 10 Movies Today list. The two titles currently outranking Cruise’s movie are the extended cut of Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt’s The Fall Guy, which recently became Peacock’s biggest film debut over the Labor Day weekend, and the Kevin Bacon-starring 1990 horror-comedy, Tremors.
Situated behind Cruise’s The Mummy is an interesting mix of horror-related movies, action titles and even Jodie Sweetin’s 2024 Lifetime romantic comedy The Heiress and the Handyman at No. 4. Behind that movie is 2018’s acclaimed horror legacy sequel Halloween, Andrew Garfield’s first Amazing Spider-Man movie at No. 6, the Tom Hardy and Austin Butler-starring crime drama The Bikeriders at No. 7, John Woo’s English-language remake of The Killer at No. 8, Radio Silence’s vampire horror-comedy Abigail at No. 9 and F9: The Fast Saga at No. 10.
Why Cruise’s Mummy Reboot Is Climbing The Streaming Charts
It’s Not His Only Poorly-Received Movie Finding Belated Success
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Considering how poorly received the movie was at the time of its release, the fact that Cruise’s Mummy reboot is climbing the streaming charts does come as something of a surprise. Beyond losing Universal upwards of $95 million and scrapping an entire franchise, the movie also proved to be one of the worst-reviewed Mummy movies to date from the studio, even in spite of the poor reviews most prior installments endured. Check out how the various Universal Mummy movies compare on Rotten Tomatoes in the chart below:
Title RT Critics Score RT Audience Score The Mummy (1932) 89% 74% The Mummy’s Hand 60% 47% The Mummy’s Tomb 29% 22% The Mummy’s Ghost 33% 17% The Mummy’s Curse 40% 20% Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy 25% 47% The Mummy (1999) 62% 75% The Mummy Returns 46% 63% The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor 13% 30% The Mummy (2017) 15% 35%
Despite the movie’s poor reception, there are a variety of reasons why Cruise’s Mummy is starting to gain some popularity on streaming charts. With the arrival of the Halloween season, audiences are certainly looking for more horror-oriented fare, and even while Peacock does have a number of other options, including the aforementioned Abigail, that is in the Top 10, Cruise is a familiar face that viewers will be drawn to watching. Interestingly, The Mummy isn’t the only poorly received Cruise-led movie to find streaming success recently, as Jack Reacher: Never Go Back has frequently appeared on Netflix’s Top 10 over the past year.
Our Take On The Mummy’s Streaming Success
A Prime Example Of Too Many Cooks In The Kitchen
As has frequently been reported in the seven years since the movie came out, part of the reason why The Mummy failed was the various creative voices going on at any one time during its production, with multiple reports pointing toward Cruise frequently exercising creative control to turn it into another action vehicle for him. Regardless of whether this is actually true, the final product for the 2017 movie certainly showed there being too many cooks in the kitchen, with its tone never quite remaining consistent between a general modern action blockbuster and direct horror movie.
2:01 Related 7 Dark Universe Movies That Didn’t Happen Because Of 2017’s The Mummy Failure One of the recent examples of a failed shared universe was Universal’s Dark Universe which had several projects canceled due to The Mummy’s failure.
Even still, I’m actually kind of glad to see that The Mummy is finding some success on streaming nearly a decade later. The first third of the movie is actually quite entertaining, while the American Werewolf in London-like dynamic between Cruise and Jake Johnson’s Chris provides some great comedy, even if the rushed Dark Universe setup near the middle of the film drastically undermines this early work. Additionally, while we may have missed out on a rare horror interconnected universe, the Dark Universe’s failure has, at least, turned into the excellent Invisible Man reboot and upcoming Wolf Man reboot.