It hasn’t even been a full two years since Universal Pictures attempted to kick off the Dark Universe with The Mummy. Unfortunately for the studio, the movie underperformed commercially and was met with mostly negative critical reception, resulting in the Dark Universe stalling before it had a chance to properly get off the ground. Still, evidently Universal is still interesting in keeping The Mummy property alive, as Punisher: War Zone director Lexi Alexander pitched a Mummy reboot to the studio. Here’s a “little peek” of the filmmaker’s pitch:
Look, me coming to help you is just a Band-Aid on the issue. Western empires have looted other cultures’ artifacts for so long, ancient deities had to eventually run out of patience waiting for white people to grow a conscience and return the colonial booty. They’re pissed and understandably so. Think about how you feel every time there’s a minor delay on the tube when you want to get home for tea… now imagine waiting 3000 years to get to the afterlife, all wrapped up like Andrew Lloyd Webber after his fifth facelift. No white savior can help you here, you need to end cultural imperialism, return their stuff and recruit some allies from their side to broker that.
After a fan expressed enthusiasm at seeing what she could do helming a Black Widow movie, Lexi Alexander, whose directing credits also include Lifted and episodes of TV shows like Arrow, Supergirl and S.W.A.T., revealed on Twitter that she’d gone to pitch her idea for a new Mummy movie a few weeks ago. As the above character dialogue indicates, Alexander’s take on The Mummy mythology had a “reverse-orientalism” tilt, something quite different from what we’ve seen in previous Mummy movies.
For those of you interested in this kind of Mummy reboot, it doesn’t look like we’ll ever see this, as Lexi Alexander noted that her pitch “will obviously never get made.” Still, considering how the last Mummy movie, which starred Sofia Boutella as the eponymous entity and Tom Cruise as U.S. Army sergeant Nick Morton, was received, it could be interesting to take the next reboot in a drastically different direction to distinguish it from its predecessors.
It was announced last month that the Dark Universe, for all intents and purposes, is dead, and that forthcoming movies centered on the Universal Monsters will take an “individualized approach” that are filmmaker-driven. In other words, just like what’s happening with the DC Extended Universe franchise at Warner Bros, Universal is no longer as concerned with focusing on the interconnectivity of a shared universe. So this kind of Mummy movie could stand out better if it didn’t have to work with tying in with the other creature properties.
There’s no word yet on what the next Universal Monsters movie to be released will be, although currently The Invisible Man is in development as a standalone feature. Johnny Depp is no longer attached to the project, Upgrade writer Leigh Channel is penning the script and Jason Blum is producing. Bill Condon’s The Bride of Frankenstein is also still in development, but there’s been no major update on its progress for over a year.
Stay tuned to CinemaBlend for all the biggest updates concerning the Universal Monsters, including if/when a new Mummy reboot gets the green light. For now, you can look through our 2019 release schedule to learn what movies are arriving later this year.
