Although The Mummy franchise really isn’t that old, we all know how obsessed Hollywood is these days with reboots.
A movie doesn’t have to be that old to be remade, rebooted, reimagined, whatever you want to call it. Now The Mummy series is next in line, and it truly may not be such a bad idea.
Deadline recently reported that Len Wiseman, the director of Underworld, Live Free or Die Hard, and the recent reboot of Total Recall, is closing a potentially lucrative deal to reboot the Mummy. Okay, so Total Recall didn’t turn out so hot, they can’t all be winners, yet with Total Recall you had a beloved sci-fi movie where the fans liked the original just fine. Now with The Mummy, if you could do it with all the cheesy CGI and try to make a genuinely scary horror flick out of it, then you may have something cool.
Screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (Alias, Star Trek) are producing the film, and Universal, who released the original Boris Karloff Mummy back in 1932, are shooting for a summer 2014 release. From what I’ve read on Deadline, I get the impression this new Mummy could try to reinvent the monster in the same way Romero reinvented the zombie.
Now I hope The Mummy doesn’t run in this one, like a zombie he’s supposed to lurch, but as Wiseman told Mike Fleming, “One of the things that interested me with this mummy is, he’s still in essence a man. They haven’t turned his brain into a monster brain. He still has a personality and is very cunning and calculating…even if he is that staggering creature, it becomes important that he’s a thinking, calculating person.”
Kurtzman also told the site he was inspired by the work of Michael Crichton who “grounded fantastical tales in modern-day science. Wiseman also promises that this Mummy will be “a darker twist on the material, a scarier version.” And let’s face it, we need fresher takes on other monsters besides vampires and zombies. Universal tried with The Wolf-Man, and it’s too bad we haven’t had a decent werewolf tale in a long time. Can the Mummy be reborn in a frightening new way for today’s audiences? We’ll just have to wait and see…
