Universal has been planning for a year to re-reboot The Mummy. The studio hired Prometheus co-writer Jon Spaihts, who saw the task “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.” That sounded okay. Then Len Wiseman got hired to direct. Maybe you love Len Wiseman; maybe Live Free or Die Hard is your favorite Die Hard, perhaps you’ve written Underworld fan-fiction, maybe you didn’t even hate the Total Recall remake (too far?). But Len Wiseman is not the person who’s going to make a Mummy movie that feels different enough from the Brendan Fraser ones Stephen Sommers directed. And now Len Wiseman has left, citing scheduling issues. So here we are.
For anyone above the age of thirteen to happily shell out and see The Mummy again, Universal should seriously consider a Name, or at least a director with a knack for originality. Think about when Darren Aronofsky was going to direct The Wolverine, how exciting that prospect was. The Mummy needs that, and now it can get it. Guillermo del Toro would be great if he wasn’t busy making hundreds of other things. Maybe Donnie Darko’s Richard Kelly could handle it, or Cabin in the Woods’s Drew Goddard. Maybe Aronofsky could reconsider dipping into franchises? He’s got to be familiar with the Fraser-era flicks; he was married to co-star Rachel Weisz. Whoever ends up on the reboot, you have no excuse not to send your favorite auteur a Facebook message immediately. Let him or her know that producers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (Star Trek Into Darkness, Fringe) say the new Mummy will be inspired by Michael Crichton and the way the author used real science to write thrilling dinosaur/gorilla/nanorobot adventures. And step on it — TheWrap says production “is still moving full-speed ahead.”
