Bob Thompson offers up some thoughts on the upcoming release of The Mummy.
1 More Mummy please
The first Mummy monster movie showed up in 1932 with Boris Karloff portraying the swaddled terrorizer. Five more Mummy pictures followed in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, if you count Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy — and why wouldn’t you? Britain’s Hammer Productions took over the franchise into the ’70s with four more Mummy movies followed by the Hollywood reboot in 1999 with Brendan Fraser. It led to two more and Scorpion King spinoffs. The latest scary Tom Cruise picture is meant to be the start of something big, as well. It may lead to more revivals — Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Wolf Man, among them.
2 Done deal
The collaborative arrangement was already negotiated. Cruise and Mummy producerdirector Alex Kurtzman worked together on Mission: Impossible III.
3 Who’s that girl?
The antagonist in the latest Mummy movie is more alluring than usual. Algerian-born Sofia Boutella, who portrays the betrayed Egyptian princess as the ghoulish one, is on a roll. She had her breakout as the blade-running sliceand-dice assassin in 2014’s Kingsman: The Secret Service and she played Jaylah in last year’s Star Trek Beyond. Rumour has it that she was hired for her Mummy role before Cruise landed his.
4 Ready ... SET ... go!
Most of the sets were constructed at Shepperton Studios in the outskirts of London to accommodate the multiple special effects. Filmmaker Kurtzman did make it a point to construct as many actual exteriors as the story would allow. That meant at least 50 sets in England, France and Namibia were real, not computer-generated.
5 Mummy money
Box office trackers project The Mummy at an OK US$40-million opening weekend in Canada and the U.S. The film’s monetary strength will be in the international market, although there is no guarantee. So far, indications are positive. Time and moviegoers will let the studio know if there is a monster mash-up in its future.