The Mummy is being brought back from the dead to get the new movie it deserves

News broke today that Lee Cronin’s New Line mystery project at New Line is a take on The Mummy, creature feature territory that’s usually Universal Pictures’ territory.

Universal Pictures ruled the horror roost in the 1930’s into the early 1950’s, thanks in large part to a large stable of creatures adapted from classic novels such as Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Invisible Man. The public domain nature of this source material easily facilitated other studios’ turns at adaptation, like Netflix’ upcoming Frankenstein.

1932’s The Mummy sported a freshly commissioned original story, for some time keeping Mummy-creature features predominantly in Universal’s hands (Hammer’s 1959 Christopher Lee-starrer, The Mummy, as the main outlier). With today’s news that New Line swooped up a new vision of The Mummy, it’s an ironic coup for the studio that puts the storied fiend in good hands.

The Mummy is a big win for New Line and horror fans

News of Lee Cronin’s new interpretation of The Mummy (co-financed by Jason Blum’s Blumhouse and James Wan’s Atomic Monster) is surely a welcome one, as Universal was unlikely to pick up the property any time soon. Universal’s doomed 2017 action-adventure interpretation of The Mummy was infamously intended to launch a “Dark Universe,” but its critical and commercial failures tanked that plan entirely.

Universal rediscovered success with Leigh Whannell’s 2020 reinterpretation of The Invisible Man, pivoting away from massive shared worldbuilding (a la the Dark Universe) and towards independent, horror-centric reinterpretations, like Whannell’s upcoming 2025 Wolf Man remake (also produced by Blumhouse).

The plot of the film hasn’t been released, but Cronin’s statement (via THR) states “This will be unlike any Mummy movie you ever laid eyeballs on before. I’m digging deep into the earth to raise something very ancient and very frightening.”

Lee Cronin is an exciting choice to helm a new look at frightening mummies. His uncompromising Evil Dead Rise was gratefully pivoted away from its intended release on Max and into theaters, where it was well received by horror fans and netted a healthy $146M on a reported $15M budget.

Swooping in to land a strong Cronin-helmed Mummy outing is also a strong move on New Line’s part, a Warner Bros.-owned studio also known for launching franchise-worthy horror villains including A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddie Krueger, and the various spiritual antagonists of the Conjuring universe.