The Mummy: a self-imposed, no-win catch-22.
I finally rewatched Brendan Fraser’s The Mummy and it holds up. I watched the first one, fell asleep during the second, and completely ignored The Scorpion King … for reasons. I’m pretty sure I’ve never even seen the third one, which is likely its own decaying mess of a sequel.
But I’ve been diving back into these flicks for a simple reason: I wanted to understand exactly how bad director Lee Cronin’s recent iteration of The Mummy actually is. If you compare it directly to the 1999 Egyptian adventure, things don’t look great for Cronin. However, that overly simplistic comparison misses the real conundrum of the franchise—one we can better understand by looking back at the disastrous 2017 Tom Cruise version.
Lee Cronin—like Alex Kurtzman before him—was never tasked with making just another traditional mummy movie. The assignment was to reimagine the IP to be more sequel and franchise friendly.
Swapping Sandboxes
Universal Studios understands that an ancient corpse wrapped in bandages is visually iconic, but the traditional Egyptian template runs out of gas fast. The archeological digs, ancient tombs, sandstorms, and curses create an ironically small sandbox. The 1999 film proved how much fun that sandbox can be, but you can really only play in it once or twice every few decades before audiences get bored.
To solve the sequel problem for Universal and Blumhouse, Cronin followed Kurtzman's prior example: he swapped the sub-genre entirely. Kurtzman tried to solve it by building a sweeping "Dark Universe" franchise—a Universal Monster version of the MCU that was as dumb as it was incredibly bad.
Cronin went smaller. Building on his work with Evil Dead Rise, he crafted an authentic horror flick that takes its cues from the possession, psychological, and body-horror genres. He abandoned the traditional Egyptian lore to build a story around an ancient demon that must be trapped in a human body and sealed in a sarcophagus. When the seal breaks, chaos ensues.
As a premise, this actually works pretty well. A demon that can possess any random body opens the world to endless sequel possibilities without losing the core Egyptian DNA. The scale becomes smaller, the stakes get intimate, and the reimagined mechanics of the curse—where the mummy recruits family members to spread a demonic virus—are genuinely clever.
Natalie Grace plays the titular mummy, a young girl returned to her family after being abducted years prior. She delivers a physically unsettling, standout performance. Her younger sister, who becomes the first to be cursed as the cult grows, is equally creepy. Because the film plays in a horror sandbox, the body horror is practical and unapologetic—the toenail clipping scene alone will make you look away.
The Collateral Damage of Expectations
Changing the genre comes with significant collateral damage, starting with audience expectations. If you call a movie The Mummy, you can't blame people for expecting the Egyptian adventure tropes of the 1999 classic.
The studio is stuck in a catch-22 of its own making: they need a fresh take to irrigate the franchise, but they can’t change the title without losing the brand recognition. If Cronin had been free to call his film literally anything else, it would have played much better. But because the title card reads The Mummy, it creates a gaping maw between expectation and reality, resulting in a movie that feels like an Evil Dead spinoff cosplaying in toilet paper.
We saw the exact same franchise strategy take shape with Leigh Whannell's Wolf Man. Universal's post-Dark Universe playbook is to go small and intimate. It worked brilliantly for the 2020 masterpiece The Invisible Man, and while Wolf Man wasn't quite as masterful, it was pretty damn good for what it was. It took creative swings with the transformation sequence through unique sound and visual design, but it was still burdened by audience expectations because it just didn't look like a classic wolfman monster romp.
Logistical Collapses and Studio Mandates
Beyond the try-hard, incredibly distracting sound design, Cronin's The Mummy starts collapsing under the weight of its own script logic. Katie, the recovered girl, is found catatonic, gray-skinned, and literally rotting inside an ancient sarcophagus. Yet, actual medical professionals just send her home with her parents because “love is the best medicine,” I guess? There is no quarantine, no government intervention, and no intensive institutional therapy.
A grounded take only works if the logic remains consistent, and here, it does not. Compounding the issue is the runtime. This intimate horror story runs for two hours and fourteen minutes—ten minutes longer than the 1999 adventure film. It ultimately becomes a loud possession romp in constant conflict with its own branding, trading genuine psychological dread for tired gross-out shocks.
Yet, Cronin's effort is respectable. It is the work of an actual genre director taking a legitimate, R-rated, practical-effects-driven swing at a legacy concept. He focused on visceral horror, even if he used his old Evil Dead tools to build it.
It will certainly never be as bad as the corporate-designed, focus-grouped-to-death, horribly miscast 2017 Tom Cruise outing. Cruise was completely unbelievable as the lead, and the only saving grace of that film was Jake Johnson's performance alongside Russell Crowe's bizarre Jekyll and Hyde setup.
Lee Cronin delivered a film with actual redeeming qualities and an honest genre swing, burdened primarily by a studio-imposed, no-win title.
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