For about 10 years, there's been a multitude of memes and nods towards the actor's skill in power-sprinting across the blockbusters of his career, particularly in the Mission: Impossible franchise, but even back to the days of Taps (1981) and Jerry Maguire (1996).

The actor himself, in admirable self-awareness, even references it on his Twitter bio, which says, "Actor. Producer. Running in movies since 1981."

For British actress Annabelle Wallis, who plays Egyptologist Jenny Halsey in The Mummy, Cruise-esque running was an inspiring force long before she was cast in the film.

"What people don't know is that my motivation in the gym was I would pretend I was running next to Tom Cruise in a film," she says. "I would put on Mission: Impossible music and I would run like ..." she mimes the Cruise sprint.

After landing the role in The Mummy as the driven archaeologist, this imaginary race against Cruise had her in good stead. When the actor actually saw her run on set, she says, he added a bunch of running scenes.

"When I found that out, when he was like, 'You're a great runner', I almost cried. It was a very big moment for me."

The Mummy, Universal's first venture into its Dark Universe franchise, is laden with fast-paced, eye-boggling stunts and exotic locations from London to Namibia. Alongside Cruise and Wallis is Sofia Boutella (Kingsman: Secret Service, Star Trek Beyond) as the titular menace, and Russell Crowe as Dr Henry Jekyll, the head of secret organisation Prodigium, which hunts down monsters.

The Dark Universe series delves into the Universal Studios vault of iconic horror films from the 1920s to the 1950s, such as The Wolf Man and Creature from the Black Lagoon, with the aim of sparking a new cross-pollinating adventures. Javier Bardem is slated to take on Frankenstein's monster in Bride of Frankenstein, out in 2019, and Johnny Depp is lined up for The Invisible Man at a later stage.

But the reopening of The Mummy sarcophagus unleashes more than a new Cruise running spree.

Alex Kurtzman, who worked with Cruise as a writer on Mission: Impossible III in 2006, is tasked with developing the Dark Universe franchise and stepped into the is producer and director of The Mummy.

Key to the story's revival, he says, is switching from Boris Karloff's terrifying Imhotep in the 1932 version, to a woman. Keeping it as a man, he says, "just didn't feel different or fresh enough".

The film is set in the present day, but fleshes out Boutella's character, Ahmanet, as an Egyptian princess from 5000 years earlier who was set to be the first female pharaoh, only to be cast aside when her father had a son. .

It brings a level of sympathy towards the character, despite her malevolence, Kurtzman says.

"Even though her story is 5000 years old, it's still really topical now. The idea of her being a woman who had been raised to believe she was going to inherit Egypt, to believe she was going to become a living god and then have all that taken away because her father had a boy, gave her a rooting interest that I connected to and made it so that she could be a strong character who is also deeply unapologetic about taking what she felt she deserved.

"And I loved that, and obviously you can draw a lot of corollary to that story today. I loved the idea that you would be scared of her because she essentially makes a deal with the devil, but you would understand why."

Boutella, an Algerian former street dancer, was the only option for the role, Kurtzman says.

"Sofia carries her soul in her eyes," he says. "Forget about the fact that she's a world-class athlete, that she's one of the greatest dancers that ever lived, that she could convey all the physicality required to make you believe that she was a 5000-year-old princess transplanted into the modern day.

"Her eyes convey such a deep empathy, and they draw you in, and I knew that I wanted the audience to connect emotionally to that character and I wanted them to both fear her and sympathise with her. No matter how much CG we put on her face or how much prosthetics she had, she would always convey that deep emotional connection and that it would make her special."

Boutella salutes Kurtzman's decision. "It's great that he made the first monster a female. It's unusual," she says. "It should be more common. Why make them mainly men?"

Despite the film's relentless stunts and, at certain stages of filming, spending six hours a day on a massage table getting full-body make-up, Boutella says it was all worth it to join the Universal Monsters canon, which mesmerised her growing up.

"These films are the first horror and monster films ever made. How it triggered my imagination and everybody's imagination was pretty interesting. Walking in Boris Karloff's footsteps was challenging and put a lot of pressure on me because it's an iconic role, he's an iconic actor. I put my heart and soul into it and it's an honour to have been given that opportunity."

The Mummy

Director Alex Kurtzman

Stars Tom Cruise, Sofia Boutella, Annabelle Wallis, Russell Crowe

Genre Blockbuster action-horror

Critical buzz A promising twist on the Cruise stunt machine

Release Out now, rated M