Universal Pictures is famously short on franchises these days, with the failure of last year's Battleship stinging particularly hard, leaving the upcoming Fast and Furious 6 pretty much their final hope. But you don't have to look too far into the past to find a time when they had a trilogy on top. The days of Brendan Fraser's Mummy series were pretty good for ol' Universal, and now-- inevitably-- they're trying extra-hard to bring those back.
They're trying so hard, in fact, that they're not taking any chances on a new script turning out well-- they're having two written simultaneously. According to Vulture, they've brought in The Hunger Games writer Billy Ray to work on a new modern-day version of the story, while Prometheus co-write Jon Spaihts continues to hammer away at the script he was hired to write almost a year ago. The idea is that at least one of those scripts will be worth making and ready to go into production by last summer or early fall. They're still hoping for a summer 2014 release, which seems nuts, but people do a lot of seemingly crazy things when there's a franchise on the line.
Vulture's insider suggests that the two writers will eventually wind up working together to bang out a workable version of the script, with one of them as a "structure and body man" and one as a "character and dialogue man"-- which sounds like a nightmarish way to work together, but who knows. Len Wiseman is still set to direct, despite the failure of last summer's Total Recall remake, and Universal seems dead set on making this movie happen. It's not the most artistic way to put together a movie, that's for sure-- but resurrecting a dead franchise is rarely about the art, now is it?
