The Mummy is returning to cinema screens in 2017, but now we’re not sure if there’s any sound coming with it.
Universal Pictures’ dropped a new IMAX trailer last week and Waypoint‘s Austin Walker noticed something curious about it. Not so much what was in it, but what wasn’t in it. The first half of the trailer featured no background music, foley, or sounds other than the actors’ voice tracks.
What it created was a delightful silent movie viewing experience peppered by the sounds of Tom Cruise and his co-stars grunting and yelling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgu7EaRCDBA
The experience is actually a really great reminder of how silly movies would be without music and context. Hearing nothing but the pilot grunting “uggghhh” as he’s torn to shred by incoming birds makes it feel like you’re watching a sweded version of the trailer.
The highlight, however, has to be Annabelle Wallis quietly straining as she’s whipped out of the side of an open plane midair, followed by Cruise doing the patented Tom Cruise Scream as the plane hurtles towards the ground.
The full sound picks up again in the second half of the trailer but by then you’re fully locked in to the notion of a sound-less version of The Mummy. You just know someone is going to recut the film to be just the actors grunting and yelling once it’s actually out.
This isn’t the rare treat you might think. It happened last year when the BBC aired a clip from 2015’s Everest that featured no sound effects. What you’re left with is a bunch of people saying “whoa” and generally bickering with one another while facing imminent death on the side of a mountain.
This happened a few years ago with the movie Everest – they a clip to media with none of the foley https://t.co/mHnwlKlTOL
— Nick Horowitz (@ztiworoh) December 20, 2016
If you wanted to watch the actual Mummy trailer with full sounds, you could do that here. Though we’re not sure why you’d want to do that. You could also just wait until it’s in theaters June 9, 2017 and keep your fingers crossed that they forget to include the sound again.
