The Mummy Is Back, and This Time It's Not Playing Around
Lee Cronin, Atomic Monster, and Blumhouse are bringing the bandaged one back — and judging by the trailer, they left the adventure-comedy somewhere in the desert where it belongs.
Allen Erwin·Hellbound Hearts·April 12, 2026·4 min readLet's get something out of the way immediately: we already tried rebooting The Mummy once this decade and it went about as well as you'd expect. Tom Cruise ran away from a very expensive monster in 2017 and the entire "Dark Universe" collapsed like a poorly bandaged corpse. So the fact that we're here again, talking about another Mummy movie, requires a leap of faith.
Here's why this one might actually be worth it: Lee Cronin — the man behind Evil Dead Rise — wrote and directed it, with James Wan and Jason Blum producing through Atomic Monster and Blumhouse respectively. That's not a guarantee of greatness, but it's a murderer's row of genre credibility that at least suggests everyone involved knows what kind of movie they're trying to make.
Not the swashbuckling adventure you remember from 1999. Not even close.
And what kind of movie is it? The story follows a journalist whose young daughter disappears in the desert without a trace — only to resurface eight years later, transformed into something horrifying. Think less Boris Karloff shambling through a pyramid and more The Exorcist doing a slow-burn possession piece. Cronin himself has cited Poltergeist and Se7en as influences — which, if you trust that at face value, suggests something genuinely unsettling is waiting on the other side of that theater door.
The Team Behind It
The production lineup here is not an accident. Cronin earned his seat at this table with Evil Dead Rise, which took a beloved franchise into an apartment building and made it feel fresh, mean, and genuinely scary. James Wan built Atomic Monster into one of the most reliable horror production companies working right now. Jason Blum has been wrong before — the 2017 Tom Cruise version had his fingerprints too — but the combination of Cronin's directorial instincts with Wan's creature-horror sensibility is a different proposition entirely.
Jack Reynor leads as the journalist father, with Laia Costa as his wife and Natalie Grace as the daughter who comes back wrong. May Calamawy and Veronica Falcón round out the cast in roles that haven't been fully detailed yet, which is either a good sign (they're protecting surprises) or a complicated sign (reshoots happened). Warner Bros. is putting it in wide theatrical release on April 17th, which means they believe in it enough to give it a real shot.
What Could Go Wrong
There were rumors of troubled test screenings earlier this year. Warner Bros. denied them loudly and specifically, which is exactly what a studio says when test screenings go badly and also exactly what a studio says when test screenings go fine and the internet is making things up. We genuinely don't know. The trailer looks promising. Trailers always look promising.
The title situation is worth noting too. The film is officially called Lee Cronin's The Mummy — his name literally in the title — because there are now two competing Mummy franchises in development simultaneously. Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz are reportedly returning for a fourth film in their adventure series, directed by Radio Silence, set for 2028. So Universal and Warner Bros. are both racing to own the same monster. The Mummy, as a concept, is apparently too lucrative to let sleep.
Cronin said this would be "unlike any Mummy movie you ever laid eyeballs on before." Given what he did to an apartment building in Evil Dead Rise, we're inclined to believe him.
Lee Cronin's The Mummy hits theaters April 17th. If the man delivers, it'll be one of the best horror releases of the year. If he doesn't, at least we'll have something to argue about.
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