Infamous Tom Cruise flop climbs Netflix chart

2017 Tom Cruise vehicle The Mummy, which famously tanked at the box office, recently made a surprise appearance in Netflix’s Top 10 most-watched movies list.

The Alex Kurtzman-directed blockbuster was Universal Pictures’ third reboot of its classic Mummy franchise, which dates back to the early 1930s. Previous Mummy do-overs include a 1959 co-production with Hammer Films, and Stephen Sommers’ 1999 remake and its sequels and spinoffs.

Of these Mummy reboots, Sommers’ version was easily the most commercially successful, raking in over $400 million off the back of an $80 million budget. This iteration of the franchise is also notable for cementing the A-list status of stars Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz, although critics were divided on the quality of each installment’s storytelling.

By contrast, 2017’s The Mummy – in which Cruise’s Nick Morton goes head-to-head with Sofia Boutella’s titular villain – was roundly trashed by critics. The movie also wound up losing Universal money once marketing costs were factored in. As a result, the studio subsequently abandoned plans to use the Mummy as the launchpad for a wider cross-property franchise called the Dark Universe.

Tom Cruise flop The Mummy climbs Netflix chart

Despite all this, the Netflix Top 10 most-watched movies in the US chart for November 5 suggests that The Mummy may finally have found its audience, given the film managed to nab the sixth slot.

The rest of the chart breaks down as follows:

1. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
2. Insidious: The Red Door
3. The Change-Up
4. Minions
5. No Hard Feelings
6. The Mummy
7. Cold Pursuit
8. NYAD
9. Sly
10. Locked In

The Mummy’s inclusion in Netflix’s Top 10 is also noteworthy because it marks the second time in recent weeks that an overlooked entry in Cruise’s filmography has charted. American Made cracked the streaming platform’s Top 5 in October, indicating that the number of people who have seen the 2017 action-comedy outing is now much higher than its modest global ticket sales would otherwise suggest.

Cruise will no doubt be hoping for similarly strong viewership figures for his latest big screen effort, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, when it eventually hits streaming. While Dead Reckoning Part One didn’t outright bomb (it’s currently the 10th highest-grossing film of 2023), its $567.5 million box office haul was underwhelming compared to other installments in the Mission: Impossible franchise.

Brendan Fraser explains why Tom Cruise’s Mummy failed

Cruise will next appear on screens in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two, after which he intends to shoot a film in space. As such, the Hollywood legend clearly has no plans to revisit the Mummy franchise anytime soon. However, if he does, Fraser has some advice: keep things light.

“The ingredient that we had going for our Mummy, which I didn’t see in that film, was fun,” Fraser said in a 2022 interview. “That was what was lacking in that incarnation. It was too much of a straight-ahead horror movie. The Mummy should be a thrill ride, but not terrifying and scary… I know how difficult it is to pull it off. I tried to do it three times.”

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