Released in 1999, The Mummy was Universal’s attempt to reboot its classic movie monster for a new audience and to say that it was successful would be an understatement. Along with its two sequels, 2001’s The Mummy Returns and 2008’s The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, the Brendan Fraser-starring franchise raked in 1.25 billion dollars worldwide.
And now four years later Universal is looking to get back into The Mummy business, and has chosen the director to lead them to (hopefully) another dozen or so Olympic-size swimming pools full of money. Deadline reports that Len Wiseman (Total Recall, a good chunk of the Underworld franchise) is “wrapping up a deal” to direct the new Mummy movie, produced by the powerhouse team of Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. This will be a full on reboot, a movie that Wiseman himself described as being darker and scarier than the Fraser trilogy.
Kurtzman also weighed in on the project and, in traditional producer mode, used the dreaded “four-quadrant audience zone” term to describe this new take, a phrase that should send shivers down the spine of anyone who sees movies as more than a profit generator. But along with that Kurtzman also stated that this new Mummy will have its science grounded in reality and listed the works of the late Michael Crichton as an influence. So there’s that.
Do we need another potential Mummy franchise this quick? Obviously not. But it’s a profitable brand and Universal has the right to glean whatever money it can from it (even though I’m sure it drives fans of the 1932 Boris Karloff original completely insane). The fact that it’ll be scarier and darker than the trilogy I grew up with is interesting to an extent but all of that creative talk gets drowned out by even a single mention of “four-quadrant audience zone” strategy. That phrase has the power to take the soul and excitement out of anything.
The Mummy reboot is currently being written by Jon Spaihts (Prometheus, The Darkest Hour) and Universal is eyeing a summer 2014 release date.