After the seeing the first two installments of Universal’s reinvention of The Mummy franchise, I flat out refuse to even see the third one. Yes, director of all that is crap and soulless Stephen Sommers left after the second one and a better director Rob Cohen stepped in to take over the helm. Is that good or bad? I don’t know. Cohen’s been hit or miss in the past, in my opinion; however, when I originally saw the first full-length trailer for The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor I was convinced I’d better stay the hell away. The rampant online hate and lousy reviews has only confirmed this suspicion for me.
Regardless of myself staying away from the theater this past opening weekend it clearly looks like I’m in the minority with this thought process. While the third entry in the franchise didn’t manage to knock The Dark Knight out of top stop, it’s still managed to pull in a respectable $40 million and change. That being so, director Rob Cohen is shooting his mouth off about a fourth movie:
“What I’m really happy about is that, by taking ‘The Mummy’ out of Egypt and putting it in China, by exploring a different approach to the quest for immortality, we now have it clear that the ‘Mummy’ franchise can travel,” he said. “Now we know that if we want to go to Mexico or we want to go to Peru, we can because there’s a cultural truth there of the mummies and these beautiful cultures.
“They have a lot of mummies. The Aztec culture had a lot of mummies and some of their mummy designs for the Foundation Army were taken from Mexican mummies that they have found,” he added. “So I think that somehow that might make the basis of a good story.”
If there is a fourth one, I can guarantee I’ll be sitting that one out, too.