It’s been a few years now, but we can safely confirm that, yes, the immediate collapse of Universal’s Dark Universe film franchise—an explicitly Avengers-esque combination of classic movie monsters that never made it past one movie—is still enormously fascinating and funny. They had such big plans! They hired so many famous people to play monsters! Johnny Depp was going to play the Invisible Man, which sure sounds better than him being a visible man!
But alas, the critical and commercial failure of the Tom Cruise-starring The Mummy movie, starring Sofia Boutella as the eponymous sarcophagus-dweller and Russell Crowe as the Nick Fury-esque Dr. Jekyll, killed the whole thing long before it could even become a disappointingly dull cinematic universe like the other high-profile attempt to do the Avengers thing. Now, Mummy director Alex Kurtzman—who was also one of the architects of the Dark Universe itself—is speaking out about the film, telling the podcast Bingeworthy (via The Hollywood Reporter), “[The Mummy] was probably the biggest failure of my life, both personally and professionally.”
He adds that there are “about a million things” he regrets about the film, but at the same time it gave him “so many gifts that are inexpressibly beautiful.” He says he didn’t really “become a director” until The Mummy (sucks to be People Like Us, his only feature directing credit before that), and it’s not because it was “well-directed,” in his words, it’s “because it wasn’t.”
Kurtzman says that failure made him a “clearer filmmaker,” and when he finds something that “doesn’t feel right,” he’s no longer “quiet about it.” He says it’s “not worth it” to keep working on something that he doesn’t think he’s going to come together, and “you can’t get to that place of gratitude until you’ve had that kind of experience.” (Kurtzman, for the record, hasn’t done a ton of directing since The Mummy, just an episode of Star Trek: Discovery and some of Showtime’s new The Man Who Fell To Earth sequel series.)
As for the Dark Universe, some weird and mysterious version of it apparently lives on in Paul Feig’s Dark Army, which is supposed to be a similar “various Universal monsters teaming up” story.