3 hours ago
3
Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz are to reunite for a new Mummy movie, the fourth in the series of films featuring Fraser as adventurer Rick O’Connell that are part of what has become known as Universal Studio’s Monsters franchise.
According to Deadline, Fraser and Weisz are lined up to return to an as-yet-untitled project to be directed by horror-comedy specialists Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, AKA Radio Silence, who previously made Ready or Not, Abigail and two instalments in the Scream series, Scream and Scream VI.
In the series’ first two films, 1999’s The Mummy and 2001’s The Mummy Returns, Fraser’s treasure hunter O’Connell meets and then marries Weisz’s Egyptology researcher Evelyn Carnahan as they battle an ancient curse and the revived corpse of the priest Imhotep, played by Arnold Vosloo. Both were directed by Stephen Sommers, and the second film also saw the screen acting debut of Dwayne Johnson as a second villain, the Scorpion King; this character received its own set of spin-off films, of which five so far have been made, though only the first, The Scorpion King in 2002, featured Johnson.
Maria Bello replaced Weisz as Carnahan in the third Mummy film, Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, released in 2008, while a “reboot” Mummy film, directed by Alex Kurtzman and starring Tom Cruise and Annabelle Wallis, was released in 2017 as the start of Universal’s so-called Dark Universe; however its poor box office returns and negative reviews resulted in the studio abandoning plans to continue the series.
The unexpected success of a 25th-anniversary rerelease of the first The Mummy saw it break into the top 20 films at the North American box office in April 2024. Fraser, meanwhile, is riding a major career comeback on the strength of his Oscar-winning performance in The Whale.
