Tom Cruise must lead

Do you have your Wonder Woman tickets yet? I’m going on Saturday, 740pm show at my favourite theatre. Here in Toronto we have VIP theatres with pre-selected leather seats and in-seat service. Which means you never have to queue for anything. My movie order is always: deep fried pickles, deep fried jalapeno poppers, a burger, some fries from Jacek’s plate, and two glasses of wine. It’s THE BEST. Can’t wait for this weekend. And it’s looking better and better for Wonder Woman. The review embargo has been lifted. The reviews are much better than Batman vs Superman. And the tracking seems to be climbing. A few weeks ago they had it at $65 million. Now they’re saying it might be closer to $85 million – maybe more.

Tracking, however, has been unreliable lately as we saw with Pirates 5 and Baywatch. Right now, tracking for Tom Cruise’s The Mummy reboot is around $40 million on opening weekend. If that holds, it’s considered a mediocre result. However, as Scott Mendelson points out at Forbes that’s also what Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation was tracking at a couple of years ago and that movie got solid reviews and opened domestically at $55 million and was considered a worldwide box office success.

What’s riding on The Mummy though is that it represents a new movie franchise. As mentioned last week The Mummy is the first in Universal’s planned Dark Universe series that will also include The Invisible Man (Johnny Depp), Frankenstein’s Monster (Javier Bardem), and Dr Jekyll (Russell Crowe), the leader of the monster Avengers, sort of. I don’t really understand what this sh-t is all about so it helps me to relate it to superheroes, which I’m not an expert on either but at least I know that they’re in a secret club and fight about how to save the world.

Anyway, obviously, for them to feel confident about moving forward with this new monster universe, Tom’s The Mummy must lead. With money. And most of that money is going to come from foreign markets. Here’s Tom in Spain this week continuing to promote the movie. The Mummy opens June 9, a week after Wonder Woman. So, back to Wonder Woman. When are you going?