Dark Universe

Geek Punditry #149: Three Wishes Presents-The Mummy

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Considering how many times it’s been shattered and reassembled by bombshell pop culture announcements, it’s kind of surprising that there’s any internet left to break. But lo and behold, that’s exactly what happened this week when news was announced that Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz would be returning for a new movie in The Mummy franchise. The two co-starred in the beloved Mummy remake in 1999, then again in 2001’s The Mummy Returns. Weiz declined to return for the third installment in 2008 and was recast, but the new movie will reportedly discard that installment and only treat the first two as canon.

The movie is gonna star these two and, I think, some kind of monster or something.

This is, not to oversell it, an announcement of the kind of cultural relevance that is usually only reserved for things like the election of a new Pope or the return of the McRib. Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy was not only a fantastic movie, but it cemented Brenden Fraser as a real movie star back when such a thing still meant anything. The way he’s had a career resurgence over the last couple of years has made people absolutely salivate at the prospect of him coming back and playing Rick O’Connell again, and the news that he’s not only doing it but bringing Rachel Weisz with him…well, as The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor proved, even the McRib just isn’t the same without the special sauce. I should know better than to write these columns before lunch.

Anyway, I am obviously pleased at this news. It even made me think of a blog post I made a few years ago, when the possibility of this franchise coming back seemed like a pipe dream, about how I would have handled the return of The Mummy. But although it’s (relatively) certain that Universal Studios isn’t going to use my ideas, I’m going to float three wishes for the new movie, three things that I – and probably most other fans – hope that they DO bring to the table when the new Mummy movie hits theaters.

#1: Keep the Family Together 

If the movie starts by breaking this up, we riot.

Fraser and Weisz’s characters met and got together in the first Mummy film. By the sequel, they were married with a child. (By the third, that child was grown up, and that’s reportedly one of the reasons Weisz declined to return – she didn’t want to be seen as old enough to have an adult son, especially just nine years after the first movie came out.) The relationship between those two characters, even more than fighting ancient Egyptian forces of evil, is why people fell in love with this franchise. There’s more chemistry between those two than a high school science lab.

But think about how many movies end with a couple getting together only to see that they’ve broken up when the sequel rolls around. Is that EVER satisfying to the audience?  (Lookin’ at YOU, The Force Awakens.) I get why it happens – some filmmakers feel like there’s not enough drama to be wrung out of portraying a happy couple in a story. I would like to submit, however, that this notion is a pile of rabbit doots. Just because you have a couple that’s happy with each other doesn’t mean there isn’t room for conflict. Couples disagree. Parents disagree. Maybe they disagree over whether their kid should be allowed to play football. Maybe one of them has a drinking problem that the other one wants to help them through. Maybe your wife keeps forgetting to put the blueberries back in the fridge after she makes our son’s breakfast and I find them sitting on the stovetop almost every single day when I get home from work. You know. Hypotheticals like that. 

These are all just examples, of course. There are thousands of ways to tell an entertaining story with a happy, loving couple and still have a satisfying narrative, as proven consistently by the very existence of Gomez and Morticia Addams. I can’t think of anything that would turn the fans off faster than starting the new movie only to learn that Rick and Evie haven’t spoken in ten years.

And it’s just not a reunion without the disreputable uncle.

In the same vein, we want to see the WHOLE family together. John Hannah played Jonathan Carnahan, brother to Rachel Weisz’s Evelyn character, in the prior three movies (even the one without Rachel Weisz). While Fraser and Weisz get most of the love when people talk about this franchise – and deservedly so, they’re both excellent – I feel like Hannah deserves more credit than he gets. Fraser and Weisz are both talented actors, capable of action and comedy at the drop of a hat. But Hanna’s Jonathan is a nice sort of foil for the two of them – cowardly where the other two are fearless, and capable of being more self-centered and deceptive than the O’Connells, whose love for each other is evident in every frame. But somehow, he’s still charming and entertaining. The third film proved that this franchise without Rachel Weisz just isn’t the same. I think you COULD make another Mummy movie without John Hannah, but assuming he’s willing to come back, why would you want to?  

#2: Keep it Family-Friendly

Family friendly, y’know? Like this.

When the Universal Monsters went through their first cycle in the 30s and 40s, they were intended to be scary. Over time, though, they became so popular in our culture that it’s almost impossible to find them legitimately frightening anymore. Writer/director Stephen Sommers understood that, and when he was tasked with remaking the classic, he didn’t even try to bring the chills. Instead, the Fraser/Weisz Mummy movies are action-oriented monster movies that anybody can enjoy. When Universal tried to use a new Mummy with Tom Cruise to kick off their “Dark Universe” line in 2017, they leaned more in the other direction – less comedy and a darker tone. I’m not saying that’s the ONLY reason the Tom Cruise movie failed, but it’s undeniably ONE of the reasons.

We can probably come up with a few others.

The new movie is being developed by the directing team of Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, the duo collectively known as Radio Silence, and I think that’s a very good thing. I’ve seen four of their movies so far – the thriller Ready or Not, the two most recent Scream films, and the bloodthirsty ballerina flick Abigail – and I’ve enjoyed all of them. Each of those films straddles the line between horror and comedy, and they do it really well. Ready or Not is, as I said, more of a thriller, but there’s plenty of humor in it. The same goes for Abigail, which is unabashedly a monster movie, but also has strong, compelling characters and some really amusing segments. And of course, anybody who’s ever read my blog in October has heard me talk about my love for the Scream franchise, a franchise built ENTIRELY on using meta humor to deconstruct horror movies, and I feel like Radio Silence did that franchise right.

But The Mummy is different. When the new movie comes out, my son will probably be around ten years old (which sounds like a typographical error, but there you are), and I would LOVE to take him to see it. He hasn’t watched the previous films, but I feel like if I can ever get him to stop watching YouTube videos of somebody shredding things for ten minutes, he would enjoy them. As much as I liked the previous Radio Silence movies, though, none of them are the kind of thing I would watch with Eddie. 

“Whaddaya mean it’s not a kids’ movie? She’s a KID, ain’t she?”

That said, just because their previous films have all carried an R rating doesn’t mean that we should expect that here. First of all, I doubt that Universal would want to resurrect this franchise if they didn’t intend to try to please as many fans as possible. Second, it’s stupid to assume that just because you’ve only seen a storyteller do one kind of story that means it’s the only kind they’re capable of. Wes Craven directed four Scream movies and created Freddy Krueger, but he also directed Meryl Streep to an Oscar nomination for the biopic Music of the Heart. Actors like Robin Williams and Jim Carrey started their career known only as comedians, but both received acclaim for dramatic works like Dead Poet’s Society or Man on the Moon (respectively). John Cena, that wrestler you can’t see, has proven himself to be both a great comedic actor AND capable of a deeply emotional performance in Peacemaker. And although enough people have learned this fact that it isn’t quite as shocking as it once was, I always enjoy the look on the faces of the uninformed when I tell them that the uplifting prison drama The Shawshank Redemption is based on a story by Stephen King. Yeah, the clown in the sewer guy.

I think Radio Silence is well aware of their audience, and I think they’re smart enough filmmakers to understand that they are the stewards of this franchise, not its masters. Of my three wishes, this is the one I feel most confident will come true.

#3: A Portal to a New Universe

Well not THAT one. Okay, MAYBE that one.

The Brendan Fraserssance that has swept up Hollywood over the last few years is certainly a factor in this movie getting made at all, but I think another important element to consider is that Universal, for years, has desperately wanted to turn their classic monsters into a legitimate franchise again. After all, they may have been the first studio ever to even TRY the shared universe concept in movies back in the 1940s when Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, and the Wolfman started showing up in each others’ films. The fact that everybody and their mother is doing a cinematic universe and they haven’t been able to get theirs off the ground must be incredibly frustrating.

And in fact, even the Tom Cruise movie wasn’t their first attempt. Four years before Marvel proved that it could work with the first Iron Man, Universal gave us Van Helsing – written and directed by Stephen Sommers, he who made the first two Fraser/Weisz Mummy films. Sommers reportedly intended Van Helsing to be set in the same universe as those movies, and it brought in the elements of the other Universal Monsters, but a planned sequel was never made. The film was only moderately popular at the box office and was lambasted by critics, but in the two decades since it was released people have started to appreciate some of the fun charm of the film. 

A shared “Monsterverse” (I’m sorry, Universal, but the name “Dark Universe” is stupid, no matter how successful that corner of your Epic Universe theme park may be) is a natural extension of this franchise. Sure, there’s gotta be a Mummy in there, because that’s what Rick and Evie are known for fighting. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t room to plant the seeds for a vampire, a werewolf, a gillman, or any of the other classic monsters that made Universal Studios what it is. 

I’ve been saying for years now how much I love the Universal Monsters, and that I thought the best way to bring them back on a major scale was to tie them in to the ONE property that has been loved by everybody in the past few decades – the Brendan Fraser Mummy franchise.

Now there’s a chance to do that. 

I guess I’m really just wishing that they don’t blow it this time.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. Bringing back Oded Fehr would be pretty sweet too. 

How I would handle Universal’s “Dark Universe”

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Universal doesn’t seem to know what it wants to do with its classic monsters. And while many would argue that we don’t really need a “Dark Universe” connecting them all, the monster rally movies did the shared universe before it was cool, and damn it, I want to see them do it again. So as often seems to happen, I’ve spent too much time thinking about how I would write stories for a property I do not own and could never officially write, and what the hell, I may as well share the ideas with you. 

First of all, you don’t start from scratch. You go back to what has already worked. And that means we gotta start with Brendan Fraser. Because everybody loves him and his Mummy movies are the best use of the Universal Monsters since the Creature From the Black Lagoon’s first splash. We canonize his films, as well as the Hugh Jackman Van Helsing, which had the same director and planned for them to be connected in the first place. 

So here’s what we do. It’s 1953. Rick O’Connell has long since retired. He and Evie are living a good life somewhere quiet, with a library for her to tend, their family to enjoy, and most importantly… no mummies.

Until the day a tour of artifacts from the Egyptian museum comes to town. 

Rick is reluctant, but Evie convinces him it would be fun to go and look at the artifacts for old times’ sake. As they do so, their young granddaughter Elsa happens across some hieroglyphics that have thus far evaded translation. The youngest O’Connell, however, has inherited both her grandmother’s brilliance and her grandfather’s recklessness, and quickly solves the inscription. As she does so, the mummy traveling as part of the exhibit awakens. The O’Connells flee, barely making it out alive and rushing back to Evie’s library to try to figure out exactly what little Elsa said. When they arrive, however, they find a young woman, packed to the gills with weapons and arcane artifacts, has broken into their home and is waiting for them.

Her name, she says, is Van Helsing. She is the latest in a long line of monster-slayers, and they’ve been keeping an eye on the O’Connells ever since that business with Imhotep. This new Mummy, like Imhotep, was a high priest. However, he found something far more powerful than anything Imhotep ever touched upon… the power of belief. The arcane and supernatural forces in the world are fueled by the belief that humans have in them – the more people who believe in them, the more powerful they grow. And the newest Mummy, awakened by Elsa’s careless words, has woken up to a world in which a new form of communication is in ascendance… television.

The Mummy visits a local carnival and manipulates the belief in the freakshow to bring two new acolytes to life: a wolfman and a gillman. Together, they take over a television station, preparing for that night’s big broadcast of the most popular television program of the age, I Love Lucy. The Mummy’s plan is to force someone at the network to break into the show with live footage of the monsters, showing millions of people the truth of their existence at once. The O’Connells and Van Helsing have to chase them down, having an adventure across the city fighting monsters of all types, trying to get to the broadcast headquarters before the truth of the monsters’ existence becomes so widespread that it will be impossible to get it back into the bottle. 

But they’re too late.

The broadcast goes out and, as people at home see the terrifying power of the Mummy and his minions, their power begins to grow. All over the world we see glimpses of creatures waking up – an enormous golem-like corpse in Eastern Europe begins moving, a malformed creature in France begins softly singing, the heir to the Griffin family finds traces of his ancestor’s legendary formula. All is lost.

Until Elsa commandeers the camera, reading off the cue cards to begin the planned live commercial for the evening. As she does so, people at home start to laugh at their own fear, realizing that they’ve just been watching a TV show, none of it is real. As they do so, the Mummy’s power fades, collapses, until the O’Connells and Van Helsing manage to slay the monsters in a triumphant finish. 

The world is safe again.

Until we see a tall, thin man watching the broadcast from somewhere else. He is as fiendishly handsome as he is evil-looking, and as he watches, he strokes his chin, pondering the possibilities of what he has witnessed. After planning all night, he notices that the sun is about to rise, and so he slips into his coffin, and closes the lid. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. If anyone reading this happens to be an executive for Universal Studios, you should know that he will work cheap.