9 Years Later, This New Horror Movie Looks Like It Can Do Something Even Tom Cruise Failed To

January 25, 2026, 2:30pm

Tom Cruise is one of the most successful and beloved actors working today, yet it looks like even he failed to do what Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is finally doing successfully. Cruise has achieved all sorts of accomplishments, whether they be his incredible stunts in the Mission: Impossible franchise, the box office success of Top Gun: Maverick, or working with beloved directors like Stanley Kubrick. However, this upcoming horror reboot has him beat in one area.

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Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is Warner Bros. Pictures’ upcoming reboot of The Mummy franchise, with it being directed by Evil Dead Rise director Lee Cronin. The first teaser for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is out now, giving a small look at the mysterious upcoming film. The movie will star Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, and May Calamawy, and it will follow a journalist and his family who discover that their missing daughter has reappeared in the desert eight years after her disappearance.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy Can Reinvent The Modern Mummy Franchise

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is incredibly exciting, as it will finally reinvent the modern The Mummy franchise by sparking new life into it. The 2026 film seems to be bringing The Mummy back to its horror roots, with it featuring a genuinely creepy teaser trailer and premise. Cronin is known for his horror, and with the film expected to get an R-rating, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is sure to be full of scares and terrifying moments.

This is great news for the franchise, as it is finally pivoting away from the direction its been headed in for decades now. 1999’s The Mummy is arguably the most iconic film in the franchise, with it rebooting and focusing on a new series starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. Instead of being a horror movie, this The Mummy was more of an adventure film in the vein of Indiana Jones. However, the subsequent sequels and spinoffs tainted the franchise, killing it for years.

Despite fans souring on the Fraser series, The Mummy was still a big name, and Universal wanted to do something with it. So, the studio took the action-adventure genre of the 1999 film, made it a bit more gritty, set it in the present day, and threw in Tom Cruise. Voila: 2017’s The Mummy was born. Universal was so confident in this project that they even advertised it as the start to the Dark Universe, a cinematic universe centered on Universal Monsters.

Unfortunately, this didn’t work out so well. The film got off on the wrong foot with its trailer, and things just went downhill from there. The Tom Cruise movie was critically panned for being generic and not properly capturing what people love about The Mummy. 2017’s The Mummy is often cited as the worst movie in the franchise, with it going down in history as one of the most mocked movies of the 2010s.

So, Tom Cruise failed to deliver a The Mummy reboot that brought about a new era of Mummymania. Luckily, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy already seems to be in much better shape, with the first teaser earning a positive reception online. If the movie does well critically and commercially, it could prove that it did the one thing Cruise couldn’t do.

Brendan Fraser’s New The Mummy Can Do Tom Cruise’s Movie Right

Interestingly, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy isn’t the only The Mummy movie in the works. Brendan Fraser is returning for a new sequel in his The Mummy franchise, presumably The Mummy 4. While this sequel is still a long way off, it is expected to be a return to the tone and adventurous storytelling of the 1999 movie, which is incredibly exciting for fans of the film.

This The Mummy movie will be a lot closer to Tom Cruise’s movie than Cronin’s is, which means that The Mummy 4 will undoubtedly draw all kinds of comparisons. While The Mummy 4 could be bad like some of the later sequels, if it is great, it will prove that it can do right what Cruise’s movie couldn’t.

The Mummy 4 probably won’t try to be a horror thriller. Instead, it will likely focus on action and adventure, proving that there is still a market for the Indiana Jones-style tomb raiding of the 1999 film. Thus, Tom Cruise’s reboot will be made even less impressive when not one, but two, The Mummy movies outshine it.

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