The Mummy 4 may become a reality in the coming years, but if it is to be a success, it would need to learn from the mistakes made by the 2017 The Mummy remake. The failed Dark Universe film starring Tom Cruise as the new lead, Nick Morton, is regarded as a box office bomb, since it only earned a domestic gross of $80 million. This is a far cry from the success of the 1999 The Mummy, and actor Brendan Fraser has guessed why these films achieved such different results.
Original The Mummy star Brendan Fraser voiced his enthusiasm for returning to the franchise, as long as the writers could develop a good concept. He noted that he had watched Tom Cruise's adventure fighting the undead in 2017's The Mummy remake, and felt it lacked some of the essential ingredients that made the original The Mummy such a success. Fraser's comments offer some idea of how The Mummy 4 could actually work, and what a potential sequel would need.
The Mummy 4 Needs To Be A Lot More Fun Than Its 2017 Reboot
Rick O'Connell, his wife Evelyn, and the rest of their crew may have been badass mummy-killers, but they never took themselves too seriously. Their tale was thrilling, but above all, it was fun. The failure of Tom Cruise's The Mummy shows that its darker formula is not what would work for The Mummy 4 - just as Fraser suggests. The 2017 The Mummy movie's titular monster, Ahmanet, was the most terrifying undead villain seen in the franchise thus far, and the significant improvement in CGI made for a more realistic monster, but it still failed to please.
A terrifying bad guy was never the point of Fraser's The Mummy. Imhotep was a thrilling villain, but that meant nothing without the balance of fun within the protagonists' journey. Rick and Evie's conflicting personalities also made for excellent comedy and a compelling romance in The Mummy. Their brainy-loves-brawn relationship was balanced by Jonathan's over-the-top goofiness, combining to create a cheesy band of misfits. By pitting this group against a monster as terrifying as Imhotep, The Mummy found a winning formula. If The Mummy 4 were to be a success, it would need to recreate this, and leave the all-thrill-no-fun formula of Tom Cruise's remake in the dust.
The Mummy 4 Would Still Need To Be Careful With Its Comedy
Of course, the balance achieved by the 1999 The Mummy movie is not easily imitated. Fraser acknowledges this tightrope of fun and thrill is not easy to pull off, stating, "I tried to do it three times." Fraser was reasonably successful in the first Mummy sequel, The Mummy Returns, but The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor failed to keep up with its predecessors at the box office. While this has been attributed to several factors, including the recasting of Rachel Weisz's Evelyn, the franchise's fall comes down to being more cringe and less delightfully campy.
In the first two The Mummy movies, the fun and comedy brought by Rick, Evelyn, and Jonathan served to break the tension of Imhotep's terrifying appearance and thrillingly tragic backstory. In The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Warrior, the titular mummy failed to bring the same amount of fear and tension. In contrast, the threequel seemed to turn up the silly comedy. If a future The Mummy 4 movie was to work, it would need to bring a terrifying villain and ensure that the comedy adequately balances that tension without overtaking it, and that is no easy task.