Can you believe it? It has now been five years since the greatest trailer for a movie ever accidentally released – The Mummy’s screaming trailer (2017), starring screaming Tom Cruise.
This trailer for the gritty, Dark Universe remake of The Mummy (originally starring The Daddy Brendan Fraser) somehow managed to stay uploaded on the original IMAX YouTube channel for a whole six days before it was taken down.
Be it a publicity stunt or a colossal mishap, it has gone down in history as a ‘laugh riot’, completely botching the idea that this could be a serious film where serious things happen and replacing such an idea with a much quieter, less cinematic experience. Here’s a reupload of that original, accidental trailer, which was originally uploaded on December 20.
Needless to say, The Mummy (2017) was a flop, failed at the box office and set the Dark Universe up for failure. One of the other movies in the franchise was Dracula Untold (2014), though it’s a bit confusing.
Despite all of that, we keep the munted audio trailer fresh in our memories. Twitter, as Twitter does, remembers the trailer fondly as a total flustercuck.
We have reached the five-year anniversary of Hollywood’s crowning achievement: that time Universal accidentally uploaded the IMAX trailer for THE MUMMY with no sound effects apart from Tom Cruise screaming pic.twitter.com/M1h2OfKSx0
— Isaac Feldberg (@isaacfeldberg) December 20, 2021
Personally, my favourite part, apart from Cruise screaming incessantly at the end with a scream-track repeated twice, is the bit where his costar, Annabelle Wallis, gets her parachute pulled on her by Cruise, after an echoed “No!” is heard and before a strange “MMM!” as she’s sucked out of the plane by physics.
— Contact Chai, I Presume ✡️ for 🇵🇸 (@PFemme2) December 20, 2021
Big fan of people taking Cruise’s scream and turning it into a ringtone too.
New Tom Cruise ringtone thanks to the dialog-only Mummy IMAX trailer. pic.twitter.com/RAMNOuppwj
— William Wilkinson (@willw) December 20, 2016
The Dark Universe itself was also, needless to say, a flop. It was intended to be a sort of Universal-Does-Marvel approach to iconic film properties, culminating in what many thought could have been a remake of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
The Dark Universe also has this hilarious old tweet, featuring those intended to be stars of The Dark Universe. The idea has been pretty obviously dropped, considering the Dark Universe web domain now links back to the Universal website.
Witness the beginning of a #DarkUniverse. pic.twitter.com/8g9eIbQfGa
— #DarkUniverse (@darkuniverse) May 22, 2017
Happy Birthday, The Mummy (2017) screaming trailer. You’ll go down in history as the best thing about your movie. You can watch it on Amazon Prime Video.