Universal Pictures has high hopes for The Mummy, their second go at launching a ‘Monsters’ cinematic universe. After the abortive Dracula Untold, which has now been scrubbed from the series canon, they’re starting afresh with what they hope will be their equivalent of the MCU. The plan is to have a franchise of films following horror icons including the Invisible Man, the Wolf Man, Van Helsing, the Creature from the Black Lagoon and the Bride of Frankenstein. After their solo films, they’ll presumably all join together Avengers style in a horror monster team to go battle against something even more monstrous.
These future plans all hinge on the success of The Mummy, which from this trailer at least looks like a very busy movie. We’ve seen clips of the show-stopping plane crash sequence before, but now we get a further taste of both the Egyptian and London locations and a better look at the flashbacks to the ancient Egyptian origins of villain Ahmanet. Apparently, she was a Princess “chosen to be Egypt’s next Queen, but her thirst for power led her down a darker path” and subsequently entombed alive. 2000 years later she wakes up and is very, very pissed off.
It looks like fun knockabout action, with Tom Cruise tossing out charming one-liners and an impressive supporting cast including Russell Crowe as Doctor Henry Jekyll, who looks to be the Universal Monsters answer to Samuel L Jackson’s Nick Fury. One thing does give me pause though – they’re apparently setting an action scene inside London’s Natural History Museum. It’s actually the British Museum that’s famous for its Egyptology exhibition, but let’s hope this is just a blip in what should be a monstrously good time.
The Mummy opens on June 9th.
Published: Apr 7, 2017 02:33 pm