8 Actors You Didn't Know Secretly Directed Films

There are many, MANY reasons that you should not give Tom Cruise control of things in general, let alone movie projects. And we can officially add "killed off an entire cinematic universe before it began" to that list, thanks to his meddling on The Mummy.

While he was not the director of the project, Cruise was drawn to the film thanks to Universal giving him final creative say on pretty much everything, including the staff. So he hired writers and a director who would stay in line with his "vision" for the movie.

While this isn't technically directing the movie, Cruise controlled so much of what the actual director, Alex Kurtzman, did with the movie, and having final sign off on the script, that he may as well have.

It's thanks to him that the movie ended up such a confused, transparently corporate mess, that spent way too much time on Cruise's unlikable mercenary character instead of the creature that's actually in the title of the damn movie.

The Dark Universe was a bad joke before it even got off the ground, but Cruise definitely helped kill it in its crib.