What the ending of The Mummy means for the Dark Universe

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS

Did you see THE MUMMY this past weekend in theaters? I didn’t. But all the same, I am tasked with reporting this bit of news that completely ruins the end of the movie. Oh, well. These are the brakes.

Anyhow, I’ll warn peeps one more time that this post includes MASSIVE SPOILERS for the new Tom Cruise MUMMY flick, and then I’ll get to it. Okay, we all good? Alright then let’s proceed.

Again, let me say that I have not yet seen THE MUMMY, but I have been told that the film ends with Tom Cruise sacrificing himself to save Annabelle Wallis (I don’t blame him) by letting some spooky spirit of some kind of ancient God into his body (insert joke here).

In the end, Cruise then rides off into the sunset, covered in bandages, and sets off to get into more trouble within the newly announced Dark Universe monster series from Universal.

The director of THE MUMMY, Alex Kurtzman, recently spoke with THR about the film and especially the “controversial” ending which saw one of Hollywood’s biggest names getting his billion-dollar mug covered up by bandages or something.

Here is what Kurtzman had to say on the matter:

It was definitely a conscious choice, and it was a choice that evolved out of a lot of design work. You always want to throw a lot into the design work. We did designs where you turned Tom into an absolute monster and you can’t recognize his face. We did a version where we went halfway and you saw and there were just little details. At the end of the day, I subscribe to the “hide the shark” theory. If you give the audience just enough that their imagination can run wild, it tends to be far more effective than just letting them see everything in the harsh light of day. That led to the idea that what we didn’t see will be far scarier than what we did see. We actually used a fair amount of the design from Tom looking like a full monster in the one moment when he screams over Jenny. Because it’s so fast, you can’t quite process exactly what it is. You can tell something is very wrong, but you can’t quite tell what it is. The choice to play their scene with Tom essentially in silhouette was very much designed from the idea that what you don’t see is going to be scarier, and there’s a subjectivity to the storytelling in that moment, because she’s trying to see him as we’re trying to see him. I’m kind of tying her experience to the audience’s experience and hopefully it makes you lean in a little more to wondering what it looks like.

THR then asked Kurtzman on Cruise becoming an antihero within the Dark Universe:

You are always looking for a way to articulate the big idea of the movie in character terms. This is the story of a monster of a human being, who has to be a monster in order to find his humanity. That was a cool organizing principle. Now he is, of course, filled with light and darkness. Those two elements are going to pull at him. Who knows what his monsterness will evolve into over the course of the next film? We have a lot of ideas about that. … They live in a gray area, not just the monsters, but the characters who inhabit their world inhabit a gray area, and I look forward to seeing how Nick’s struggle evolves, because he now understands the best version of himself, and yet, he’s going to have a literal devil inside of him. How are those two things going to work together?

And finally, Kurtzman on if Tom “Mummy’s Boy” Cruise will return in other Dark Universe flicks before THE MUMMY 2?

It’s entirely possible.

So there you have it. Tom Cruise has become the new Mummy in the Dark Universe and may or may not return in future installments of the series. There was also a bit of a hint in there that we’ll be seeing a MUMMY 2 (or should it be THE MUMMY TOO?) in the future.

Again, I can’t pass judgment on the flick because I haven’t seen it YET, but I’ll go ahead and point you guys to both John Landis’ thoughts on the Dark Universe HERE. And our own Eric Walkuski’s thoughts on the Tom Cruise MUMMY flick RIGHT HERE.

Let us know what you thought of the ending of THE MUMMY on Facebook, Twitter, and/or Instagram.

THE MUMMY is currently playing in theaters.