I’ve never been all that enamored with the latest Mummy remake (1999), which, like the Van Helsing series, was overrun with wall to wall CGI.
Instead of delivering action, scares and thrills, both the Mummy and Van Helsing felt more like video games, and not in a good way. Any why not? The two films were directed by Steven Sommers, and the overdone CGI effects are always a big tip off that he made a movie.
So now you can add The Mummy to the remaket pile, because it is going to be rebooted yet again. Interestingly enough, as Empire reports, there’s actually a connection to Ridley Scott’s upcoming Prometheus, because Jon Spaihts, who co-penned the sci-fi thriller, is the writer who will be bringing the Mummy back to life.
Like the previous Mummy movies, the new reboot is set up at the same studio, Universal, with the same producer, Sean Daniel, who was an executive at Universal in the late seventies, and who also produced Dazed and Confused, along with Tombstone.
Variety reports the new Mummy will be redone “on an epic scale,” and as writer Spaihts told the trade magazine, “I see it as the sort of opportunity I had with Prometheus: to go back to a franchise’s roots in dark, scary source material and simultaneously open it up to an epic scale we haven’t seen before.”
Spaihts has also been pegged as one of Variety’s Screenwriters to Watch, and he’s also working on a movie called World War Robot, a sci-fi flick for Jerry Bruckheimer, a sci-fi flick that Keanu Reeves is producing called Passengers, and yet another sci-fi flick dubbed The Darkest Hour for Summit.
With strong anticipation for Prometheus, clearly Universal wants to strike before the flick hits theaters, and hopefully is a hit at the box office, hence hiring Spaihts to write the script.
And if you think about it, when the crew of the Nostromo came to the world of Alien, it had a lot of Egyptian touches, almost like they were entering an intergalactic tomb. If Spaihts can deliver great scares and adventure to a Mummy remake on that scale, maybe a reboot of the franchise isn’t such a bad idea after all.
