Earlier this year we heard that Total Recall director Len Wiseman would be rebooting The Mummy franchise for Universal. At the time producers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (Cowboys & Aliens) said it would be “a darker twist on the material”, and now Wiseman has provided a few more details about what we can expect.
From MovieWeb:
The Mummy is one of Universal’s long standing, iconic characters, well before the Brendan Fraser movies… This is such a different thing. What was attractive to me…There is still a script to be written, and all of that….But the pitch was to go with a much different tone. It was a Mummy like I’d never heard of before. Its nothing like what you would expect, at all, oddly. I was picturing Egypt, and the sand swept settings. The mummy wrappings. When I heard what they were wanting to actually do with it, it was shocking…
Wiseman also revealed the story will take place in the present day, which would provide audiences with a different setting as the Brendan Fraser trilogy took place in the 1920s and had an Indiana Jones vibe to it.
“It’s horror. Its epic. It’s more of a modern day version of what would happen if we came across a mummy in our world today. It is pretty fascinating.”
Stephen Sommers and Rob Cohen were responsible for the most recent adaptation in the late 90s and early 2000s with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz leading. The three films earned over a billion dollars worldwide and spawned spin-off’s such as The Scorpion King and a few direct-to-DVD efforts.
Universal are apparently aiming to release the film in the summer of 2014, but it doesn’t seem like a script is in place yet so it could be late-2014 or 2015.
