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The messed-up Mummy trailer is mutating faster than Universal Pictures can keep up

The messed-up Mummy trailer is mutating faster than Universal Pictures can keep up

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Wait, there’s a Mummy reboot?

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We live in an age of reboots and cinematic universes. And yet I had no idea that Hollywood was rebooting The Mummy until this morning, when the IMAX YouTube channel uploaded a Mummy trailer in which the sound was hilariously butchered. It was a pretty fantastic goof.

Instead of riding the gift of a spontaneous publicity wave for an unnecessary reboot, Universal Pictures is now doing The Dumb Thing and issuing DMCA takedown notices to stop the trailer from spreading. But the folks at Universal Pictures are forgetting one of the most beautiful and terrifying things about the internet: you can’t stop it, you can only hope to contain it.

Almost everything on the internet is a moving target

They’re also forgetting that almost everything on the internet is a moving target. Because the elements that make the accidental trailer so funny — Tom Cruise’s screams, especially — are spreading like a virus. And with each mutation, they become simultaneously more resistant to Universal Pictures’ anti-piracy tech, and more deeply embedded in the collective consciousness of the internet:

And, of course, one for the holidays:

Another thing that’s beautiful about the internet is that it allows you to find joy in places you never expected. To wit, I wouldn’t have woken up thinking “Boy, I really can’t wait to see the trailer for the new Mummy movie” even if I had known it was coming. And yet here I am, having enjoyed not just a bunch of laughs at this accidental trailer, but at the inevitable goofs that followed.

So here’s to these goofs, and to all the other riffs that are literally being created as I type out this post. Because it’s only in this moment that I’ll be able to suck any joyful marrow from the bones of a movie I never would have bothered to see in the first place.