Those mad bastards are trying to resurrect The Mummy again
Evil Dead Rise director Lee Cronin is set (with Blumhouse) to take on the horror brand that brought The Dark Universe to its knees
There aren’t a lot of film brands that can be specifically, and directly, blamed for the stillbirth of an entire planned cinematic universe, but The Mummy is certainly one of them. The 2017 Tom Cruise vehicle didn’t actually bomb in a technical sense—making $410 million at the box office, with Chinese audiences making up a healthy portion of that bulk—but it was so poorly received by critics, and so shrugged at by audiences, that it single-film-edly killed Universal’s big, dopey, and highly mercenary plans for a “Dark Universe” based off of its classic monster movie properties. But you know what they say about mummies: They’re always ready to pop right back up again, causing trouble, and murdering people so they can get back their magic amulets or whatever.
Hence news today that horror houses Atomic Monster and Blumhouse are teaming up for a new version of the classic franchise, with Evil Dead Rise director Lee Cronin set to both write and direct the project. Details about the film (which had previously been promoted as a mystery project for Cronin, whose Rise was well-received by horror fans) are basically nil, but we’re going to assume it involves less “Tom Cruise does action stunts in a plane and trades quips with a dead Jake Johnson” and more things that are actually scary. Or, to quote Cronin, who gave a statement today to THR about the news: “This will be unlike any Mummy movie you ever laid eyeballs on before. I’m digging deep into the earth to raise something very ancient and very frightening.”
Past Mummy films have typically gone the adventure movie route, possibly because it’s difficult to make a guy in bandages properly frightening to anyone who’s ever seen one be outfoxed by the likes of Abbott and Costello. Cronin has shown a knack for getting genuinely unsettling shit on the screen, though, so color us cautiously optimistic for a Mummy film that isn’t also spending several minutes of its run-time trying to get audiences intrigued by the idea of Dr. Henry Jekyll, horror movie superhero.