In Universal they bet big on ‘The Mummy’ in 2017 and then they ended up taking such a brutal hit that the much promoted Dark Universe never got past there. The curious thing is that if we look at its collection, it turns out that even today it is one of the 10 top grossing tom cruise movies until now, why is it then one of the biggest flops in history?
A matter of costs
To that question one can simply answer that ‘The Mummy’ It was so expensive that Universal ended up losing nearly $100 million on it.but you have to dig a little deeper to understand how that happened with a film budgeted at 195 million dollars that had a worldwide income of almost 410 million.
The main problem is in a “hidden” cost that is often ignored when talking about successes and failures in Hollywood, since the majors come to invest real barbarity in marketing. That cost in the case of ‘The Mummy’ shot up to 150 million dollars, so Universal’s actual investment was $345 million.
There will still be those who say that 410 million are more than 345, but it is that the cinemas keep part of the money. Normally it is said that the division is around one half for the theaters and another for the production company. Then there are many nuances within that version, but the most important is that things change in china, since the production company only receives 25% of what is entered there. And China was the country in the world where ‘The Mummy’ had the best income with a collection of 91 million dollars.
That yes, ‘The Mummy’ later obtained more income both in sales in domestic format, television rights or streaming, but as Deadline revealed, it was expected that the net income for Universal taking all that into account would barely reach 250 million of dollars, which translated into a historic loss of 95 million.
It is true that at that time there was a worldwide box office of 375 million instead of 410, but in return the sales of DVD and Blu-ray performed worse than expected. come on what the losses could have been somewhat less, but not by much. Of course, it is worth noting that some sources reduce the budget to 125 million, so then it would still be a failure, but a much tighter one.
As I pointed out before, all this did not prevent ‘The Mummy’ from being one of Tom Cruise’s highest-grossing films. At the time he came to occupy eighth place, standing just behind ‘Rainman’which amassed 412 million dollars in 1988, and ahead of ‘Mission Impossible 3’, which was 199 million in 2006. Since then it has dropped two places thanks to the tremendous success of ‘Mission Impossible: Fallout’ and, above all, everything, ‘Top Gun: Maverick’.
You can see ‘The Mummy’ on Cuatro tonight starting at 10:15 p.m.