10 Films That Made Audiences Dumber

When The Mummy made $415 million worldwide, it lead to a series of movies inspired by Universal’s classic monster movies made by people who’d clearly never watched them.

The two sequels were bad enough, but when Van Helsing failed to repeat their success, it should’ve torpedoed all future efforts. It didn’t, so we got Dracula Untold and The Wolf Man, which one studio head described as “crappy” and “one of the worst we ever made.”

But here’s the punchline: The Mummy had nothing to do with the 1932 Boris Karloff (or even the sequels with Lon Chaney). It wanted to be Raiders Of The Lost Ark instead, an old-fashioned romp through the desert with a disaster-prone hero, large scale action set pieces and plenty of special effects. All its success proved was that you could ignore the source material, make a generic action movie and still score a smash hit.

A new version of The Mummy, starring Tom Cruise, is due for release in June 2017, so we’ll see.