The Mummy's Brendan Fraser Confirms He's Open to Fourth Film

Brendan Fraser is keeping his options for a return to The Mummy franchise. The actor portrayed explorer Rick O'Connell in 1999's The Mummy, 2001's The Mummy Returns, and 2008's The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. The highly successful franchise turned Brendan Fraser into a household name, with The Mummy garnering a spinoff with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson playing The Scorpion King.  The fourth film in Fraser's The Mummy was tentatively planned, but Universal Pictures chose to reboot the franchise instead. Now, Fraser is opening up about appearing in a fourth movie in The Mummy franchise.

"I don't know how it would work," Brendan Fraser told Variety as part of a cover story on the making of The Whale. "But I'd be open to it if someone came up with the right conceit." The Mummy director Stephen Sommers added how Fraser was cast because of his ability to throw and take a punch.

"He could throw a punch and take a punch and he had a great sense of humor," Sommers said. "You really like the guy. He never comes across as cocky or arrogant." Fraser did many of his own stunts on The Mummy, even suffering an injury to his knee, though it didn't deter him from filming his scenes. 

"He was game for anything we threw at him," Sommers said.

Fraser also commented on Universal's 2017 reboot of The Mummy with Tom Cruise in the leading role. "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," Fraser added. "I tried to do it three times."

Tom Cruise, Johnny Depp, and Russell Crowe in Universal's Dark Universe

Tom Cruise's The Mummy was supposed to kick off a new shared Dark Universe for Universal, centered on its classic monster characters such as The Mummy, The Invisible Man, Frankenstein, and more. Tom Cruise, Russell Crowe, Johnny Depp, Havier Bardem, and Sofia Boutella infamously took a group photo together to promote the Dark Universe. However, the lackluster performance of Cruise's The Mummy forced Universal to cancel its shared universe plans, and focus on individual movies.

Brendan Fraser Responds to Batgirl Cancellation

Batgirl was a DC movie scheduled for release on HBO Max. The film starred Leslie Grace as Barbara Gordon/Batgirl and Brendan Fraser as her nemesis Firefly. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav made the decision to shelve Batgirl, among other high-profile projects in a cost-cutting move.

"It's tragic," Fraser told Variety. "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."   

He later went on to praise the Batgirl filmmakers Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah. "Everything that Adil and Bilall shot felt real and exciting," he said.