The Mummy's return revives one of the best dormant franchises of the past few decades

Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz finally escaping the franchise tomb

As a teen in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I grew up right in the height of The Mummy mania, and all these years later, it can be easy to forget just how successful and influential those films were at the time.

With news that Universal is reportedly reviving the franchise — with original stars Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz set to reprise their roles — it’s a good time to look back and put it all back into context before we look ahead.

I grew up watching the original two movies on VHS and cable as the background to a good decade of my life. They are fun, funny, heartfelt and just really, really good. And the 1920s and 1930s setting really gives them a timeless feel, unlike a lot of their 1990s and early 2000s movie peers.

The Mummy opened in 1999 and made more than $400 million at the box office, and was quickly followed by the 2001 sequel The Mummy Returns which pretty much matched that low-to-mid $400 million box office haul. The movies were hits, and for a generation of fans, turned Fraser and Weisz into timeless sex symbols.

There was also The Rock-centric The Scorpion King spinoff in 2002, which grossed a soft but solid $178 million, and would spawn four (yes, really!!!) direct-to-DVD sequels over the following decade or so. But the less said about all that, the better.

It took several years of development hell for third installment of The Mummy to arrive in 2008 with Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, and all that languishing tinkering and development time showed up on the screen, with the film easily the worst-reviewed installment in the mainline franchise (and to be clear, the movie was pretty bad). But to be fair, it did still crack $400 million at the box office, so a modest success regardless.

Then after that…. nothing.

The winding road to a new The Mummy movie

With returns starting to diminish a bit, and a pretty long lag between the second and third movies, development on a fourth film in the Fraser/Weisz saga kicked around development for a year or two before finally being shelved for plans to just reboot The Mummy franchise entirely with a new concept.

You might remember that as the 2017 Tom Cruise movie called The Mummy, a modern-day horror adventure that was designed to kickoff a connected film saga of horror stories dubbed the Dark Universe (remember, this was a time when a lot of studios were looking to get a slice of that Marvel Cinematic Universe pie with their own properties). Cruise’s The Mummy made a little over $400 million at the box office with generally meh reviews, and in 2017 dollars (and with a big ol’ production budget) that simply wasn’t good enough. Especially with plans to build a full universe of connected horror flicks off this launch pad.

So, the Dark Universe was quietly shelved and Universal went back to doing more standalone horror flicks like Elizabeth Moss’ hit 2020 Invisible Man adaptation and the excellent 2025 vampire flick Abigail.

But now? All these years later? The trades are reporting a legacy sequel with Fraser and Weisz is back on the table and in development. The directing duo Radio Silence (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett) are making this one, and their track record of bringing Scream back with a mix of old and new characters feels like a perfect proving ground for how to find a way into bringing The Mummy back to life.

Also of note, yes, The Mummy movies were a couple of decades ago. But Brendan Fraser is just 56 years old (by comparison, action star Tom Cruise is 63 and still making Mission Impossible movies), and Weisz is just 55 now. So certainly still young enough to play a pair of aging but still spry supernatural-fighting heroes.

I’ve thought for years that a legacy Mummy sequel could be a bona fide hit. There’s still a ton of nostalgia and love for the original movies, and Fraser and Weisz are also in the midst of their own career renaissances with some great recent roles. If done right, it could kick off a new run of Mummy movies not unlike the revived Scream saga.

I can’t wait to see where Rick O’Connell and Evelyn Carnahan ended up.