"Welcome to a new world of gods and monsters," is the message from the trailer, which gives a dramatic taster of the supernatural and sinister realm that the film aims to unleash.

There's a particularly jaw-dropping scene where the military plane Cruise and a crew are travelling in gets into strife and crashes.

Cruise and his co-star Annabelle Wallis are tossed around the aircraft's interior, a scene achieved by filming in a zero-gravity environment.

"We actually shot that on a real airplane and we built the set inside the aircraft and did it Zero-G all in one shot," says Cruise, speaking exclusively to Fairfax Media.

"I always wanted to do that – with wires you can't fake what I wanted to get and we really got something that is quite terrifying and uniquely violent."

The cast and crew spent two days filming in a Novespace Airbus aircraft off the coast of Bordeaux, France.

For the stunt, the Airbus dropped its thrust at 25,000 feet, free-falling to create the effect of weightlessness for about 20 seconds. The process was repeated 60 times to get all the key sequences for the scene.

The Mummy is the first outing in a new franchise being launched by Universal this year as part of its Monsters Universe series; a collection which is reviving classic characters from its vault including Dracula, Frankenstein's monster and the Invisible Man.

The Mummy, set in present day America, harks back to the horror of the 1932 version starring Boris Karloff.

As seen in the trailer, the film has also reset its title character as a woman in Sofia Boutella (Star Trek Beyond), an "inspired" idea says Cruise by director Alex Kurtzman.

"This film is going to be very scary," says Cruise.

Adding to the menace of 2017's The Mummy is a cast that includes Russell Crowe, stepping up as Dr Jekyll.

"Monsters are things that we're fascinated by, we're terrified of," says Cruise. “It invites this kind of big scale movie-making that is very challenging, really exciting.”