The biggest question hanging over Lee Cronin’s Mummy reboot is simple: will it actually be scary? Based on who they hired, probably yes.
Cronin built his reputation on slow dread. Evil Dead Rise worked because it didn’t rush — it let you understand exactly what was at stake before things fell apart. The horror in that film was domestic first, supernatural second. A family trapped in a parking garage basement, relationships curdling before the blood started. By the time it got loud, you already cared about who was in the room. That’s a different instinct than the 2017 Tom Cruise version, which was essentially an action movie that occasionally remembered it was supposed to involve a mummy.
The original 1932 Karloff film was genuinely unsettling. Atmosphere, mythology, something ancient and wrong. Boris Karloff barely moved and still managed to be menacing — the threat was the idea of him, the weight of whatever he carried back from the dead. The 1999 Fraser version swapped all that for adventure comedy, which honestly worked fine on its own terms. It was fun. But it kicked off decades of the franchise not knowing what it was supposed to be, each new installment trying a slightly different genre blend and none of them fully committing.
Cronin being attached is a legible choice. You don’t hire an indie horror director to make a blockbuster. If the studio wanted set pieces and one-liners, they had other options — plenty of directors who know how to stage a chase through a crumbling tomb while someone quips about their insurance coverage.
There’ll be action — there’s always action — but that probably won’t be the film’s center of gravity. The Mummy, at its core, is a story about something that should not exist anymore, walking around anyway. That’s a horror premise. It doesn’t need a car chase. The thing worth watching isn’t whether it’ll be horror-leaning. It’s whether Cronin actually gets to make the version he’d make, or whether the budget brings enough competing voices that the edges get smoothed off before it reaches a theater. Studios have a habit of doing that — hiring someone interesting and then being surprised when interesting turns out to mean difficult.