10 Movie Adaptations You Already Know Are Doomed To Disappoint

It's difficult to picture how some films wind up getting past the pitch stages. And yet a bizarre chain of events - which included Tom Cruise signing on - resulted in the The Mummy being rebooted/readapted (what is this, even?) for the audiences of 2017.

Can we all agree that this, from what we've been allowed to see so far, is shaping up to be one of the strangest blockbusters of the last decade? It is plainly jarring to see Tom Cruise in a horror/fantasy film, for starters, but that's not even the worst part: what we have here looks like it was made in 1997, back when the "original reboot" - talk about an oxymoron - hit cinemas. It's Mission: Impossible - The Mummy.

It is hard to imagine how this happened, especially when you consider that Russell Crowe is also set to turn up as Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde. Also: can you really trust the writer of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, arguably the worst motion picture ever made, calling the shots behind the camera and making creative decisions?

Perhaps The Mummy will ultimately emerge as a crazy slice of B-movie fun - and indeed, as the first movie in a new "Universal Monster Shared Universe," the campier the better, right? But it's hard to imagine Cruise playing this any other way but totally and utterly straight, because look how serious he is in the footage. So serious.