Would you believe "The Script Stinks"?
Actually, I’m not sure I would. Though IESB, the site currently running neck-and-neck with the hard-charging Collider for this year’s "Oh, Don Piano!" trophy (carefully judged by our own Devin Faraci), is citing anonymous sources claiming Rachel Weisz backed out of Rob Cohen’s The Mummy 3: Curse of the Dragon due to her displeasure with the Alfred Gough/Miles Millar screenplay, I’m going to put on my speculatin’ tam-o’-shanter and wonder if it even got that far. Certainly, Weisz must’ve received the script, and may have even leafed through it out of morbid curiosity, but let’s give this very smart woman a little credit: why would she return to a long dry-docked franchise when its "creator", writer-director Stephen Sommers (still smarting from Van Helsing*), ain’t even coming back? And even if Sommers were back in the saddle, there’d still be no real upside for her aside from the payday.
Weisz just doesn’t strike me as the kind of actress to chase down paychecks in between interesting projects like Rian Johnson’s The Brothers Bloom and Wong Kar-Wai’s My Blueberry Nights. Though she’ll definitely maintain her market value by appearing in commercial pictures, she’s way too good for crap like Mummy 3: Curse of the Insipid Subtitle. When Weisz cashes in, she’ll work with legitimately talented mainstream directors like David Dobkin; Oscar winners should never stoop to Cohen (as Jamie Foxx learned with 2005’s talking homicidal jet stinker, Stealth).
Rumor analysis over. You may now return to one seriously slow news day.
*While Van Helsing raked in $300 million worldwide, it completely botched Universal’s plans to re-introduce their "Classic Monsters" to a new generation. And this is a good thing because, had it succeeded, there’s no way we’d be getting a Mark Romanek/Andrew Kevin Walker/Benicio Del Toro Wolfman.