The Mummy franchise is back with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz returning for a new movie currently in development at Universal Pictures.
The film will be directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the Radio Silence team known for Scream and Ready or Not. The Mummy movie series, originally a 1990s action-adventure-horror franchise, is now getting a sequel described as “a continuation that will disregard the events of the third film.”
David Coggeshall (The Family Plan, The Deliverance) is writing the screenplay, and franchise producer Sean Daniel returns to produce alongside William Sherak, James Vanderbilt, and Paul Neinstein of Project X Entertainment.
Fraser and Rachel Weisz previously starred together in two Mummy films, The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns (2001). Both were directed by Stephen Sommers, inspired by one of Universal’s classic movie monsters, and each earned over $400 million worldwide.
The 1999 film introduced Fraser as Rick O’Connell, a brave American adventurer and former French Legionnaire, and Weisz as Evelyn Carnahan, an English Egyptologist at the Cairo Museum of Antiquities. Across the two movies, their characters grow from reluctant partners to a married couple with a young son, confronting ancient curses and battling the resurrected Egyptian priest Imhotep. In the sequel, Evelyn dies after discovering she is the reincarnation of an Egyptian princess but is later revived by Rick.
Universal later tried to reboot the franchise with Tom Cruise in 2017, but the film underperformed and failed to launch the studio’s planned Dark Universe, which aimed to connect its classic monster films into one shared universe.
Speaking to Variety during the press cycle for The Whale, Fraser said he is willing to reprise his role as adventurer Rick O’Connell in another Mummy sequel.
Fraser said, “I don’t know how it would work,” he said at the time. “But I’d be open to it if someone came up with the right concept.”
He added, “It’s hard to make that movie. The ingredient we had going for our Mummy, which I didn’t see in the new one, was fun. That was what was lacking in that incarnation. It was too much of a straight-ahead horror movie. The Mummy should be a thrill ride, but not terrifying or scary.”
The new Mummy movie is expected to start production soon, and as of now, there is no official release date.
Source: Deadline
