IGN was among a small group of press invited to get a first look at footage from The Mummy , Universal's relaunch of one of its classic monsters franchises and the first in what is hoped to be a new shared universe. Or, more accurately, a new version of what was one of Hollywood's first shared universes. Universal's classic monster movies -- The Mummy, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolfman, The Invisible Man, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Phantom of the Opera -- began as individual films before becoming separate franchises and finally crossover films. Beginning with 2017's The Mummy -- starring Tom Cruise, Sofia Boutella as the title character, and Russell Crowe as Dr. Jekyll -- Universal is aiming to resurrect these iconic creatures and, in some cases dormant, franchises as a Marvel-style shared universe for contemporary audiences. Or, as the studio's slogan for The Mummy declares it, "a new world of gods and monsters."

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Sofia Boutella in the title role of The Mummy.

Tom Cruise as Nick Morton in The Mummy.

In the film, Cruise's military character Nick Morton finds himself cursed after an encounter with the Mummy. We were shown a sequence where Nick is brought by gunmen to an industrial facility that turns out to be the headquarters of an organization known as The Prodigium, which is where he meets Dr. Henry Jekyll. The Prodigium has been on the hunt for monsters -- the purpose of which was not made known to us -- but it can be speculated that Jekyll and The Prodigium might be like Nick Fury's Avengers Initiative, a building block for this would-be shared universe of Universal Monsters.The Mummy's producer-director Alex Kurtzman (Fringe, Star Trek, Transformers, The Amazing Spider-Man) spoke with the press -- and then one-one-one with me afterward -- to shed some light on why he wanted to make this film, his hopes and ideas for the shared universe that it aims to spawn, and why it's so important to maintain the creatures' iconic designs.I have to say it's just the truth, I tend to gravitate toward the things that meant something to me when I was a kid. And so it wasn't just seeing Frankenstein and then sort of discovering... I remember I was obsessed with Universal Studios. All I wanted was for my dad to take me to the Universal Studios and go on the tram ride. They used to have this, I can't remember what it was called, but it was a monster show and all the monsters came together in Dracula's castle and it was like later replaced by the Conan show and whatever it was, but it was awesome. I remember Dracula showed up and Frankenstein showed up and by the way forget about walking around the park and turning around and seeing Frankenstein there as a kid that will embed itself in your mind. I just loved these monsters. So much that really I decided four was a good age to start introducing my son to the monsters, which maybe makes me not a great parent, but I feel like there's something so human about them. If you're facing the prospect of being a studio filmmaker of some kid and making studio movies your choices, especially now, are very limited in terms of do you want to make a superhero movie or do you want to make...? And the thing that I loved so much about the monsters is that the assumption is that they're broken and that fixing them no longer makes them a monster so they have to stay that way. And if you want to write something sort of complicated that's about kind of the nature of us all having a monster inside of us, I mean, I think that's why the monsters have endured. They're all weird reflections of aspects of our personalities. I can't really think of anything I'd rather be doing than that.That it takes place in the Middle East? You always want to sort of hit a note without being too blunt about it. My first instinct was wow, given what's going on in the Middle East right now, if whatever was happening was somehow responsible for unearthing the Mummy, you're already in a really topical place. You don't actually have to say much more than that. The Mummy is unearthed because of what's going on in the middle east right now. So right off the bat, you're there. I think making the Mummy a woman is a whole other modern way to go that feels utterly necessary. And casting Sofia to me was utterly necessary. There was literally not a second choice. It was only Sofia from the moment I saw Kingsman, which I f*****g loved. What blew me away was the performance that she gave without a single line of dialogue. I think she doesn't have a single line of dialogue. I knew the Mummy was easily going to be the hardest character to cast in the movie, like, hands down. You're one molecule off in that casting and it's just going to blow up. It's not going to work. And I then found out about her, what an amazing dancer she is, her physicality. Right off the bat, boom. She's got the physicality. But then she has, if you look at her eyes, and this is what I got from watching Kingsman, there's a whole performance going on here. And in not saying anything but conveying that much to me, I thought oh my god, no matter how much prosthetics we put on her, no matter how much CG we put on her face, if I see this, she's going to convey something very emotional to me. Also making her a woman I think as I said it opened up a whole story avenue that made the telling of the Mummy story fresh.No, he's a bad man. He's a bad man. I think the good man has to do bad things falls into the paradox of I've seen that a lot. And it's not wrong, it's not a wrong choice, but in the unique mixture of this movie and the fact that we have a movie star who is also an actor who loves to play the bad guy, you know, again, you want to put the gun in the hands of the person who should not be holding it. Things happen to him in this movie that really test where he is on the morality scale. He starts at a zero. The question is, weirdly, by becoming a monster or moving into that territory will he find his humanity? And that's the question. And that question got me really interested because suddenly it was like oh, this is a very atypical character arc. You know what I mean? This is not a... and if you go by the logic of what we're saying, the movie doesn't have to have a happy ending per say. It has to have an authentic ending. It has to have a satisfying ending. The movie isn't necessarily like he has to be a good person at the end of the movie. That frees you up a lot in terms of your storytelling.It would be our dream to have him in the shared universe, for sure. I mean, for a million reasons. Again, I don't want to give away too much of the movie. But the intention is definitely, like, if I could make every movie with Tom, I would.Oh, that's a good idea.We're on the record. If we end up going down that road, you will absolutely get credit for that.I love that idea.In some ways, yes. But you know, you asked the question of what are the modern elements that kind of define these characters in the modern world and she plays a woman who works for cultural heritage. I don't know how much you know about the cultural heritage guys, but they are the ones going around defending these places that ISIS is blowing up and trying to protect those things and sort of trying to salvage as much of it as possible. You always need an archaeologist in a Mummy movie, but you want to do it in a way that feels actually really different and isn't the studied bookworm version that's been done a thousand times. She's time woman who has been running around the middle east actually doing that. She's very smart. She's very educated. She really can hold her own. She also has a secret that is incredibly significant in the story. That reveals itself over the course of the movie and suggests she might not be entirely what she says she is.No no, her name is Jenny Halsey.Not, she's a totally invented character.You know, it's not even that there's pressure. I think as I said one of the things that revealed itself very quickly in playing around with the designs of these monsters is that when you start removing the things that are iconic it actually just doesn't feel right. It just doesn't feel right. And yet, there are certain things that don't entirely work in the modern context. And so the question is, are you able to make micro adjustments that feel right and relevant without in any way destroying or denying the main points of those characters? The main visual points of those characters.I see no reason why we can't. I think the question is just the story has to tell us it wants that. There has to be really a reason to do that. But I don't, I think if we just stay within our own gene pool of monsters it would start to feel stale at a certain point. Look, what's going to define it is... what is the worst situation we can put them in? And the answer might be, actually we need to invent somebody for that.Yes. As Russell says, from the Latin monstrum vel prodigium. A warning of monsters.It's certainly a way to look at it. I haven't thought of it that way. Yeah, in that he is really the central voice of that organization. He's dedicated a lot of his life resources and work to it. The question of how old he is, the question of how long he's been around, that's another conversation.I want this to come out the right way. I might not say it in the right way so I apologize in advance if it doesn't. Even the way you described those to me, there is something not right about them. It's kind of, it's public domain, but it doesn't really feel like those monsters. And I think that's because they're not the Universal monsters. I think that's because we know the Universal monsters. Dr. Frankenstein exists in the world of the Universal monsters. Now, Dr. Frankenstein existed before that. Okay. Of course. But in terms of our visual reference, our cultural understanding of that, "It's Alive," it's a Universal movie. You can't deny that. You can't deny those things and you can't deny the visual iconography of those movies. And so that to me is why all those other movies don't quite feel like they are authentically that. People have endeavored to make the authentic Mary Shelley Frankenstein and it still doesn't feel like Frankenstein. Maybe because for whatever reason it didn't quite work. But I think that the Universal monsters are so specific and the reason I'm not really worried about the other monsters isn't because I don't think someone else isn't capable of doing a great movie, I just think that culturally this is so embedded in people's consciousness that if it's not that, it's kind of the fake version. That's sort of what it feels like.