In 1999 Stephen Sommers and Brendan Fraser collaborated to bring us a remake of Universal’s The Mummy. Despite conventional wisdom and 13 years of work since that’d suggest the contrary, the film was pretty good. Two heinous sequels later and it’s time to reboot. With Sommers, Universal hired a director full of potential that would go on to become awful. This time they’re skipping the middle man by simply hiring a director who already is awful: Len Wiseman.
According to Deadline‘s piece, the film dusts ol’ Ihmotep off and inserts him into the modern day. The remake’s produced by Bob Orci and Alex Kurtzman who’ve enjoyed successful if uneven (quality-wise) careers with films like Star Trek and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. The following quote comes from Kurtzman, and this is where shit gets shittier:
“It’s still a four-quadrant film but as a lot of recent movies have proven, audiences are hungry for more than they used to be. You can still have a family movie, an action movie that’s more grounded than these used to be. Without saying too much, we’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from Michael Crichton’s books, and how he ground fantastical tales in modern-day science.”
The term “four-quadrant film” refers to a movie that hits on all four key demographics: male, female, both over and under 25 years of age. So instead of taking a classic property and reworking it into an engrossing film, they’re just going to hit on as many demographics as they can and hope it all sticks. And they’re doing it with the safest, most pedestrian director working in genre film today. If The Mummy is butter and we’re a piece of toast, Kurtzman and Orci’s plan is to spread that shit as far and wide as their dull butter knife (for purposes of the metaphor, Wiseman) will allow.
Point being: A + B = C, and this film is going to suck.