Mama Director To Take Over The Mummy Reboot

The upcoming reboot of the Mummy franchise found itself in stasis in late July when director Len Wiseman wound up being too busy to direct it, but now Universal Pictures seems to finally be pushing the project forward. Andres Muschietti, who directed the early-in-the-year horror hit Mama, is now in talks to take the reins of the supernatural thriller, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Few details are currently known about the film, which is being produced by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Sean Daniel, but according sources Jon Spaihts' script tells the legend of the Mummy in modern times. This will differentiate it from all of the previous titles in the franchise, which were all set back in the 1920s. The studio has gone on record that the movie will be a "action-adventure tentpole with horror elements," and, as THR notes, brand new characters.

The mention of "horror elements" does make the project sound like it would be a good fit for Muschietti. Mama was actually the director's first feature film and it managed to scare up a lot of money at the box office, pulling in $146 million globally on a tiny $15 million budget (it's not exactly hard to see why Universal - which also put out Mama - would want to keep him around. Prior to his feature debut the filmmaker had directed the short film on which the movie was based, which you can watch in full below:

Things seem to be pretty hot and cold with this project. The description of the movie above makes it sound as though Universal is very excited to get this project going, but the pre-production process has been rather slow. Spaihts was first hired to pen the script in April of 2012 and Wiseman was first mentioned with connection to the film last September, about ten months before he eventually decided that his schedule was too full to make it happen. In that same time frame Universal hired Billy Ray to write another version of a Mummy movie that they could potentially make instead of Spaihts' version, but the original writer ended up winning out.

Because of all of the behind the scenes back and forth we don't know exactly when the new Mummy movie might actually go into production, but if it can get everything together perhaps it could join movies like Joss Whedon's The Avengers: Age of Ultron, Zack Snyder's Batman vs. Superman and Colin Trevorrow's Jurassic World in the summer blockbuster season of 2015, which is already set to be absolutely nuts.

Eric Eisenberg
Assistant Managing Editor

Eric Eisenberg is the Assistant Managing Editor at CinemaBlend. After graduating Boston University and earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism, he took a part-time job as a staff writer for CinemaBlend, and after six months was offered the opportunity to move to Los Angeles and take on a newly created West Coast Editor position. Over a decade later, he's continuing to advance his interests and expertise. In addition to conducting filmmaker interviews and contributing to the news and feature content of the site, Eric also oversees the Movie Reviews section, writes the the weekend box office report (published Sundays), and is the site's resident Stephen King expert. He has two King-related columns.