Poll of the Day > I love how people call things like The Mummy a "flop"

(+) Yeah! (+)

It actually made 174 million this opening weekend, and killed in some outside markets like China
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It's a remake of a popular franchise (sort of) and it stars Tom Cruise. Anything less than huge success is gonna be considered a failure. I saw it and it was pretty bad. It's super shameless about being the set-up to an extended universe and that every studio thinks they can just tell audiences that's how it's going to be is pretty galling.

I have mentioned this before, but a movie budget is not the end-all-be-all to decide if it made money or not. The budget doesn't include marketing, which for many movies can far exceed the actual budget. For simplicty sake though, I will just say that a movie has to make 2X it's budget to make money. So far, The Mummy hasn't done that. Not to say it won't, but considering how much it is getting panned by critics and fans alike I doubt it.

So yea, as of now it is definitely a flop. Compare that to Wonder Woman which is getting a ton of praise and made $450 million on a similar budget. Wonder Woman is a success and The Mummy is not.
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This version of the trailer is better than the movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRqxyqjpOHs
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FrozenBananas posted...

It actually made 174 million this opening weekend, and killed in some outside markets like China

You actually gave the reason right there why some people consider it a flop.

For all the money it made, only about 20% of it was domestic. In the US, the film is a massive failure. Nearly all of its financial success is rooted in the foreign market, most of which is from China. Which is often seen as a negative from a quality standpoint, because the Chinese seem to like any terrible movie we crank out as long as the special effects are good (see also, the same reason why Transformers movies keep getting made).

The real problem is that Hollywood is catering more and more to the foreign market, BECAUSE there is so much money to be made there. But because the Chinese market requires certain elements for success (elements which don't necessarily equate to worthwhile narrative or interesting stories - indeed, strong narrative is actually a negative for the international market, because it's harder to translate), it means that movies which are deliberately made with the Chinese market in mind (which The Mummy definitely seems to be) tend to be much worse creatively from the Western standpoint.

The problem is only exacerbated when you consider this film is supposed to be the tent-pole for multiple future sequels set in the same universe. Strong stunt casting and leaning heavily on pre-existing mythology aside, it's essentially failed to energize the domestic market at all. Odds of viewers wanting to rush out to see the next film in the series are slim at best, at least in North America. The sequels WILL get made (the logistics of planning a long-term franchise mean they almost have to be, no matter how terrible this movie might have done), but they'll likely be even worse from a creative perspective, because the studio will need to skew them even MORE towards the foreign market than they already did (and they absolutely did).


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I thought it was pretty decent. I didn't see any trailers or read anything about it beforehand which helped I think.
The female lead was pretty cute though. I want to see her in more movies.
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Chinese people thought it was cool cuz American white guy fight mummy!