No one really knows why a movie works. After a century of Hollywood, the industry is still trying to understand and adapt to an ever-evolving audience. As we enter an era of peak remake and IP-grab filmmaking, stories from decades ago have become the studios’ easiest bets to make money. It’s not fertile ground for creativity, but we movie fans have to take our wins where we can.
One such concept primed for a big return is The Mummy, which itself is more focused on a somewhat generic horror character with a long cinematic history. In 1999, a fun and romantic interpretation of The Mummy redefined the core concept for a generation of viewers. Starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz, the film launched a franchise and became a gateway into the action-adventure genre. A new sequel has been announced, getting fans carefully excited.
Production on The Mummy: The Book of the Dead kicked off early last month, with a release scheduled for late 2027. Directed by Radio Silence, the filmmaking duo behind Ready or Not and the Scream reboot, the film reunites the original cast, including Fraser, Weisz, and John Hannah.
The 1999 movie is also streaming for free on YouTube, making this the perfect time to revisit or watch this formative Millennial classic for the first time.
The Mummy is set in the mid-1920s in Egypt, where Rick O’Connell (Fraser), an American in the French Foreign Legion, is imprisoned and sentenced to be hanged. His luck changes after Evelyn Carnahan (Weisz) miraculously comes to his aid, bargaining with the warden and securing his release. She and her brother Jonathan (Hannah) have a puzzle box containing a map of Hamunaptra, the lost City of the Dead said to hold the pharaoh’s treasure. The two believe O’Connell can best guide them to the site.
While on their search, Evelyn finds a locked black book hidden in the ruins. It’s the Book of the Dead, an ancient text with the power to bring the dead back to life. She reads a passage and unknowingly awakens Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo), a high priest from ancient Egypt, hell-bent on reviving his lover, Anck-su-namun (Patricia Velasquez).
The Mummy knows how to have fun
There’s nothing revolutionary about The Mummy’s plot, but it’s efficient, taking our heroes from place to place at a zippy pace, complemented by good jokes and serviceable action. Fraser delivers one of the most memorable performances of his career, with Rick becoming a key action hero of the era. While handsome and capable, he’s also dumb. When faced with a screeching and crumbling mummy, Rick screams back before shooting at it. He’s balanced by Evelyn, a brilliant librarian and Egyptologist who keeps the plot running with her sharp observations and historical knowledge. While she is guilty of reanimating the mummy, we can’t fault her; she’s so intoxicated by the material, it’s even charming.
The brawn versus brains dynamic is one of the reasons why the film works so well. It’s as if the filmmakers took the character of Indiana Jones and divided his two main characteristics, depositing them into separate characters and setting them up to fall in love. It makes both Rick and Evelyn necessary for the story to work. The fact that we get a great romance out of it is icing on the cake.
If anything I’m saying suggests that The Mummy was critically acclaimed upon its release, I want to correct that. It was not. While it performed well at the box office and inspired two sequels, critics were mixed, criticizing its story and script. Still, most acknowledged how fun it was. “There is hardly a thing I can say in its favor, except that I was cheered by nearly every minute of it,” wrote Roger Ebert. He gave it three stars out of four.
In recent years, The Mummy IP has been remade twice. The first was led by Tom Cruise, and it was meant to launch a cinematic universe that would rival Marvel and DC. After the movie bombed at the box office, the universe was quietly abandoned, even though Javier Bardem, Russell Crowe, and Johnny Depp were already on board.
Fraser himself summed it up best. “The ingredient that we had going for our Mummy, which I didn’t see in the new one, was fun,” he told Variety in 2022.
The second remake was Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, a straight horror adaptation that followed a missing girl who comes back cursed. It was also not fun at all. Despite the terrifying marketing and the inclusion of the filmmaker’s name in the title, it couldn’t escape the shadow of Fraser. Weeks before its release, Blumhouse, which produced the film, went viral after tweeting, “BRENDAN FRASER IS NOT IN LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY.”
That’s the thing with movies. No matter how much research goes into a project or how closely it follows trends, it’s hard to predict what audiences want and what ends up clicking onscreen. Chemistry that overcomes and elevates average writing can’t be fabricated. We don’t know what will happen with the 2027 sequel, but if anything, it has Fraser and Weisz.
The Mummy is streaming on YouTube.