Brendan Fraser on What The Mummy Did Better Than Tom Cruise’s Dark Universe Reboot

August 19, 2025, 6:50pm

The Mummy is enshrined in the annals of adventure movies. Part Indiana Jones and part Jason and the Argonauts, director Stephen Sommers’ remake of the 1932 Boris Karloff classic resurrected the Universal monster movie when it stormed theaters in the summer of 1999. Starring Brendan Fraser as adventurer and treasure hunter Rick O’Connell and Rachel Weisz as Egyptologist Evy — who unwittingly awakens the cursed Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo), a 3,000-year-old mummy entombed as punishment for an affair with the accursed Anck-su-namun (Patricia Velásquez) — the trilogy-launching The Mummy made over $400 million at the global box office.

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Fraser reflected on the film’s enduring legacy during a recent panel appearance at Fan Expo Denver, where the Oscar winner reunited with Mummy co-stars Velásquez, John Hannah (Jonathan Carnahan), and Oded Fehr (Ardeth Bay).

“People come up to me and say, ‘I just want you to know that because of this film, The Mummy, I’ve gone into the field of either archaeology or history,’” Fraser said. “People have really been moved by this movie in a real, personally changing way. It happens in every city I go to, so that’s a really nice reminder that this film still has legs. Thank you for that.”

Fraser returned for 2001’s The Mummy Returns, again helmed by Sommers, and 2008’s The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, directed by Rob Cohen. (Sommers went on to make the Hugh Jackman-fronted monster mash Van Helsing for the studio in 2004.) When the moderator asked whether Universal had plans for a “monster verse,” Fraser answered, “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

“I know that Tom [Cruise] tried to make this movie,” Fraser continued, referring to the 2017 Mummy reboot starring Cruise as soldier of fortune Nick Morton and Sofia Boutella as the eponymous mummy Ahmanet. “We all know how hard this movie is to make. I tried to do it three times, okay?”

Cruise’s costly Mummy movie earned $410 million worldwide in the summer of 2017, but its reported $345 million budget resulted in a loss for the studio, which scuttled plans for a Dark Universe, a cinematic Monster universe set to introduce Johnny Depp’s Invisible Man and Javier Bardem’s Frankenstein’s monster.

“The essential ingredient in all of these films that we made was that, let’s face it, it was fun,” Fraser said. “It was fun. It was a thrill ride, you wanted to do it again.”

“And so the answer is, you’ve just got to give everybody what they really, really want,” he added. “And if you stray from that path, then it’s a different entity in its own. So heck, if it worked once, do it twice, et cetera, et cetera.”

Universal’s theme park division, Universal Destinations & Experiences, has since revived the Dark Universe branding as a themed area at Florida’s Universal Epic Universe, while Revenge of the Mummy: The Ride — an actual thrill ride — opened at Universal Studios in California and Florida in 2004.