Quick setup if you haven’t caught a trailer. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy centers on a broken family reeling from the disappearance of their young daughter, who vanishes into the desert without a trace. Eight years later, she returns. What should be a miracle reunion turns into a living nightmare.
Jack Reynor and Laia Costa play the parents. May Calamawy, Natalie Grace, and Veronica Falcón round out the cast. Cronin wrote and directed. No Brendan Fraser, no Tom Cruise. Just one family, one desert, and something they should not have brought home.
An in-depth chat with Lee Cronin, Jason Blum & James Wan
Let’s be clear. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is not your Sunday afternoon adventure movie, and it’s not trying to be. It’s a horror film first, monster movie second. Warner Bros. set up a horror room activation at the press day to make that point, and our writer CJ volunteered to walk in first. Needless to say, they got her. She was still catching her breath when we sat down for the interview.
GoC caught the film at an early press screening before heading over to The Lighthouse Campus for the press day. Once CJ recovered, we sat down with Cronin and producers James Wan and Jason Blum, to get into it: Why a horror take on the franchise had never really been tried, how Cronin pulls half his scares out of practical sound design, and what got cut to protect the pace (yes, more scorpions).
The best moment might’ve been when Jason Blum reached for the old Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy to explain the approach, caught himself mid-sentence, looked at James Wan like he owed him an apology, and said the quiet part out loud about the 1999 version: Great movie, but not a horror movie. That’s exactly the lane Cronin stepped into.
Why a Horror Version Had to Exist
Between Cronin, Wan, and Blum, this is one of the deepest horror benches you can put on a single film. Wan built the modern horror canon twice over with Saw, Insidious, and The Conjuring, and now runs Atomic Monster. Blum runs Blumhouse, the studio behind Get Out, The Invisible Man, M3GAN, and the 2018 Halloween reboot.
Cronin is coming off Evil Dead Rise, the 2023 hit that pulled off the same move asked of him here. Take a legacy horror title, make it feel new, don’t cheapen it. Between the three of them, there are a couple of decades of experience on what actually scares people.
So the reboot started with a gap on the shelf and the right trio to fill it. Wan wanted to add something to The Mummy canon that none of the other entries had fully tried.
“I’m a big fan of The Mummy films,” Wan told GoC. “We could add our own voice to the library of great mummy films out there, except we wanted to do something that was modern, contemporary, that is also very scary. That was when we reached out to Lee Cronin.”
For Cronin, the pitch was the pitch. Build the scariest mummy movie ever made, and find a group of characters worth putting through it.
“I loved the idea of making a terrifying mummy movie because it hadn’t been done before,” Cronin said. “Can we make the scariest mummy movie of all time? As a storyteller and as a filmmaker, that’s pretty enticing. Then it was about finding a story I was passionate about, a group of characters I was passionate about, and figuring out all of the dark, crazy, fun, weird things I could do to those people.”
The Invisible Man Playbook, New Monster
Blum drew a straight line to Blumhouse’s 2020 The Invisible Man, which treated a legacy Universal monster as a straight horror film instead of a franchise setup.
“We had a great experience making The Invisible Man, which was reimagining these monsters back to their origins as event, scary, fun movies,” Blum said. “What attracted me about the script was seeing The Mummy through that lens. The Mummy as an event, straight horror, scary movie. As opposed to broadening it out to something else, like an action.”
Then came the mid-sentence correction.
“I really like the old Brendan Fraser – I keep saying Brendan Fraser’s Mummy. Sorry, James. Stephen Sommers’ Mummy. Those are great movies. They are not horror movies.”
Sound Design Built From Old Keys and Metal Bolts
For Cronin, sound is half the scare. Coming off Evil Dead Rise, he stayed practical on set and carried that same sensibility into post.
“This movie has a lot of practical visuals, and I carry as much of that practical [feel] into the sound design as well,” Cronin said. “You can find a stock doorbell sound online, but I’ll say, let’s make it rattlier. So we build something with old keys and metal bolts and get the doorbell sound just right.”
What Didn’t Make the Cut (Including More Scorpions)
Ambitious horror leaves material on the floor. Cronin said this one is no exception, and hinted at scenes that might one day resurface in a longer edition.
“There are definitely some things that didn’t make it,” Cronin said. “There’s more scorpions. There’s some other things that didn’t quite make it to what we’re bringing to theaters very, very soon. Usually it’s for the right reasons. Pace. Tension.”
He ducked the director’s cut question with one of the best lines of the day: “I’m Irish. They probably sat down at a cup of tea and went, ‘Whoa, That was a trip.’”
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