It’s older than a decade, which means it’s practically begging for a reboot…
on April 5, 2012 at 11:16 AM
A reboot script for The Mummy has been commissioned. Hooray. While I’m not excited by this in the least, I’m going to be generous and throw out some reasons why a reboot of this isn’t anywhere near as atrocious as whatever Michael Bay decides to do to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
1. It’s one of the classic Universal Horror monsters. A search on IMDB for “mummy” brings up over a hundred films, and while a few of them involve the use of the word to imply a female parental unit, it’s mostly about walking corpses covered in Ace bandages. Getting angry that they’re being unoriginal from the get-go is a ship that sailed sometime in the 1950′s, I think.
2. It’s not like the most recent version was all that great, anyway. It was a mostly empty-headed affair that couldn’t decide what it wanted to be other than a showcase for computer-generated special effects. You could almost smell the Indiana Jones fanfic from the script, but whoever kept inserting the “comic relief” (i.e. the scene with bookshelves toppling like dominoes, the mummy soldiers suddenly becoming as flexible and scenery-chewing as cartoon characters, etc.) killed a lot of the high adventure vibe, I think.
3. Maybe it will stop them from making more sequels to the current iteration of the series. Seriously, when it’s no longer about Imhotep and has decided to be about The Scorpion King, but without the original actor who portrayed the character, it’s probably time to call it a day. It gets even worse when the latest direct-to-SyFy sequel stars people from Uwe Boll films and starts to resemble a Dragonball episode.
So, yeah, that’s money that won’t go to a new film idea, but one could say this is traditional. If they’re actually “rebooting” the 1999 version with the same characters but “re-imagined,” then perhaps someone should be physically punished. I hope they go for more fantasy/horror this time around, perhaps even skipping the usual trope of the female lead being the reincarnation of whoever the mummy-monster had the hots for when the Valley of the Kings was still a swingin’ place.
Ahh, who am I kidding? One bandage-covered PG-13 “romp” in 3D awaits. Perhaps the mummy’s curse is real, but it only applies to movies?
Yeah, Universal has clung pretty tightly to their ‘Renewing Intellectual Property’ rope. There’s been years when that particular cash cow was the only one they had, so they’re trying to make sure nobody else steals their precious monsters.
I think they need to make a Dracula film, personally. A *good* one. Actual *monster* vampires, not tormented pretty boys.
I could see them remaking Bram Stoker’s Dracula (that was still Universal, right?), but this time Gary Oldman could play Van Helsing.
Nope! It was Columbia. Hence the appending of ‘Bram Stoker’s’ to it – the book is in public domain, so they really can’t control if someone wants to make a movie off it. Ditto Frankenstein, which TriStar released under ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’.
It’s why the Van Helsing movie had such a mashup of monsters, really – each one renews IP on the version of the monsters that Universal owns. Only one they haven’t done much of late is the Fishman, which is both so undeniably Universal AND incredibly absurd that nobody’s really bothering to do anything with it.
“Shadow of the Vampire” was a really neat take on the “Dracula” tale, and a nifty movie as well.