How to make the perfect ‘Mummy’ movie, according to Brendan Fraser

Posted On November 6, 2025November 6, 2025

You would think it isn’t too hard a process to come up with a really good ‘The Mummy movie’. You just need a good-looking guy with a white shirt ripped open, a beautiful woman to cling to him, some kind of pyramid or tomb, an ancient being that gets awoken, and then millions of bugs streaming out all over the place. Simple. But apparently it’s more complex than that, according to the original star, Brendan Fraser.

And he might well know, because he was the hunky actor who was propelled to fame by the success of the original The Mummy back in 1999 (although that was a remake of a movie from 1932) and, along with British actor Rachel Weisz, had audiences thrilled as the intrepid adventurer Rick O’Connell, doing inadvisable stuff like awakening a long dead supernatural priest. 

Directed by Stephen Sommers, it was a throwback movie to the romantic swashbucklers, which took a long while to get made due to various screenplays and directors, plus the challenges involved with filming in the Sahara Desert. On release, it got pretty mixed reviews but turned out to be a massive hit, bringing in almost half a million dollars, kicking off a new franchise that would eventually make a movie star out of the WWE wrestler The Rock. 

His first involvement came in the first sequel, 2001’s The Mummy Returns, which brought together all the original cast members, plus Sommers, to direct. And once more, the film repeated the trick of lukewarm reviews but enormous box office returns, with fans lusting after Fraser in the lead role and revenue exceeding the first film. 

A third movie, a prequel, followed with The Scorpion King the next year, but minus most of the stars, and it wasn’t until 2008 that Fraser was tempted back to the world with The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, which nobody really remembers, didn’t have many of the original cast and yet somehow still pulled in over $400m at the box office.

Then the undead were finally allowed to rest until the ill-advised and even worse received reboot in 2017, with Tom Cruise inexplicably cast in the lead. It went down like a lead balloon, losing almost $100m at the box office, and Fraser believes he knows why.

He told Variety: “It is hard to make that movie. The ingredient that we had going for our Mummy, which I didn’t see in that film, was fun. That was what was lacking in that incarnation. It was too much of a straight-ahead horror movie. The Mummy should be a thrill ride, but not terrifying and scary.”

For a few years now, after Fraser’s multi-award-winning comeback in 2022 in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, there have been rumours about a fourth Mummy movie in development, which would reunite Fraser and Weisz with Sommers directing. 

But despite a lot of noise, there are no definite dates or team behind the production, so fans of Rick O’Connell are likely going to have to wait for a while. As Fraser added, “I know how difficult it is to pull it off. I tried to do it three times.”

Luckily for Fraser fans, they’ll have plenty of upcoming movies to enjoy him in, though, starting with Rental Family, about a struggling actor living in Japan, which arrives in UK cinemas in January, plus a role in the JFK shooting movie Assassination with Al Pacino and Bryan Cranston. 

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