Brendan Fraser open to a fourth Mummy movie, shades Tom Cruise reboot

Brendan Fraser has played a number of great roles throughout his career, but one of his most iconic is surely Rick O’Connell, the hero of The Mummy trilogy from the 2000s. Those movies catapulted Fraser to a new level of stardom, and though it’s been quite a few years since 2008’s The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Fraser says he’s not totally closed off to revisiting the franchise.

“I don’t know how it would work,” Fraser told Variety while promoting his new movie The Whale, “but I’d be open to it if someone came up with the right conceit.”

Brendan Fraser: the Tom Cruise Mummy reboot wasn’t fun enough

Though seeing Fraser return to the world of The Mummy would certainly be interesting, Universal hasn’t let the franchise lie undisturbed in the meantime. In 2017 the studio released a reboot with Tom Cruise, which flopped hard enough that no sequels were made. Since he’s made a few of these Mummy films, Fraser had some ideas on what went wrong.

“It is hard to make that movie,” he said. “The ingredient that we had going for our Mummy, which I didn’t see in that film, was fun. That was what was lacking in that incarnation. It was too much of a straight-ahead horror movie. The Mummy should be a thrill ride, but not terrifying and scary.”

"I know how difficult it is to pull it off. I tried to do it three times."

Fraser’s not wrong; the Tom Cruise-led Mummy movie was certainly a more dour affair than the humorous adventures of Rick O’Connell and company. There’s no doubt that if Fraser ever did return to the series, the new movie would be more light-hearted than Cruise’s film. Now if someone can just get Rachel Weisz on board and a good script, maybe we’ll see another Mummy movie yet.

Brandan Fraser says Batgirl cancellation was “tragic”

Fraser also talked to Variety about the cancellation of Batgirl, where he played the role of the villainous Firefly. The movie, which was more or less complete when Warner Bros. Discovery decided to pull the plug, starred Leslie Grace in the title role. Fraser described the movie’s cancellation as “tragic”:

"It doesn’t engender trust among filmmakers and the studio. Leslie Grace was fantastic. She’s a dynamo, just a spot-on performer. Everything that we shot was real and exciting and just the antithesis of doing a straightforward digital all green screen thing. They ran firetrucks around downtown Glasgow at 3 in the morning and they had flamethrowers. It was a big-budget movie, but one that was just stripped down to the essentials."

Warner Bros. Discovery has had a rough go of it of late; the other day it laid off over 100 people.

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