If there’s one thing you should be able to count on from movie studios—home of creative accounting—it’s the ability to count when deciding on a title. For the most part, Hollywood is good about this: There’s one psycho in Psycho, 2,000 maniacs in Two Thousand Maniacs!, one damage in Damage, more than one in Damages. This kind of clear labeling policy is good for consumers: Depending on the number of aliens you’re in the mood for, you can confidently watch Alien or Aliens. But now Universal is threatening to upset the apple cart: As the new trailer makes clear, The Mummy has a lot of different mummies in it, sometimes as many as four in a single shot. This nearly as bad as the time Stanley Kubrick—working for Universal, naturally—promised audiences one Spartacus and instead gave us hundreds!
Still, if the studio survives the inevitable truth-in-advertising class action, they might have a winner on their hands, because this trailer for director Alex Kurtzman’s reboot—which, unlike the last trailer, has a complete audio mix—actually looks good. Tom Cruise dies in a plane crash, comes back to life, and gets eaten by rats! Sofia Boutella gets buried alive! Russell Crowe gets trapped forever in a cinematic universe where he has to repeatedly appear as “Dr. Henry Jekyll!” It’s all pretty spooky, and the plotline whereby Tom Cruise may, himself, be some variety of mummy, seems like a good way for screenwriters Christopher McQuarrie and Jon Spaits to work a twist or two into the film’s ancient premise. How many twists, exactly? Universal won’t say—and even if it did, after this counting debacle, who could believe them?
