It has been nine years since a Tom Cruise movie trailer became a massively hilarious meme and helped bring down a new franchise before it had a chance to really get going. Cruise has been in some of the biggest and best movies over the past five decades. From Top Gun to his mega-successful Mission: Impossible franchise, Cruise is one of the biggest movie stars of this generation. However, in 2017, he was part of the attempt to build a new franchise with some other massive stars, and it all crumbled down around them. Despite the franchise’s failure, there was one incredible thing that came out of it, and it was a mistakenly released trailer.

The year before Universal Studios released The Mummy, the studio released an IMAX trailer to raise fans’ anticipation. However, the trailer was a massive failure because whoever put it together didn’t get the soundtrack pieced together correctly. The music and sound effects were missing, and all that remained was some dialogue and a lot of Tom Cruise screaming.

Tom Cruise Screaming in The Mummy Trailer Became a Huge Meme

When Universal Studios released The Mummy in 2017, it was part of an overarching attempt to reboot the Universal Monsters franchise for a new generation called Dark Universe. However, things had not gone well to this point. In 2010, Universal released Joe Johnson’s The Wolfman, which was supposed to be the start. It ended up being ignored, and Universal started again with Dracula Untold in 2014, an origin story for the vampire. That was a disappointment, and The Mummy was supposed to start things again. After this IMAX trailer, the movie never had a chance to match the ludicrousness of the mistake.

The IMAX trailer for The Mummy was missing almost all the sound effects as well as the music cues. What remained was some dialogue and very loud screams by Tom Cruise. The sound effects slightly muted the screams in the real trailer, but without those effects, it was just Cruise screaming. This was such a colossal mistake that, even after Universal took down The Mummy trailers, enough people had seen it and saved it that they began to use it in a viral meme campaign.

People made videos of clips from other movies with Cruise’s screams playing over them. This included Darth Vader at the end of Revenge of the Sith, Superman after he killed General Zod in Man of Steel, and even over the volleyball scene from the original Top Gun. This was similar to Matt Smith’s dancing scenes from Morbius, but on a movie that had a lot bigger expectations. Unfortunately for Universal, more people remember these Tom Cruise screams than anything that happened in The Mummy.

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