On May 4, 1999, Universal’s The Mummy hit theaters and became one of the biggest movies of the year, even outearning James Bond and Julia Roberts films released in the same window, with over $400 million worldwide. It solidified Brenden Fraser’s star power and put him in the action-hero category for a new generation. That level of success helped spawn two sequels, video games, a spin-off series with The Rock, and an animated television series.
Oh, and of course the ride at Universal Studios theme parks. It’s still an absolute banger and hasn’t been updated in 20 years over at Universal Orlando. Even if the sequels didn’t capture the same sort of magic, 25 years later Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy is still a crowd-pleaser that somehow didn’t get lost in the shuffle in a summer where everything fell under the shadow of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and the one-two punch of sleeper hits The Matrix and The Sixth Sense.
Almost 100 years ago, Universal Studios’ band of monster movies helped forge a whole new genre and create a new batch of pop culture icons. These Classic Monsters–Dracula, Frankenstein, the Creature of the Black Lagoon, the Invisible Man (and Woman), the Wolf Man, and the Mummy made their own cinematic universe along the way with crossovers and tie-ins.
The latter of those monsters had five movies under Universal’s banner and four with Hammer Films, who had rebooted the series in 1959 with the final sequel coming out in 1971. There wouldn’t be another Mummy movie for 28 years, where it was again rebooted under Universal, who had already missed out on Dracula and Frankenstein’s remakes aimed at being truer adaptations of their source material. The Mummy was just a mummy, though, malleable to any kind of story, but still seen as an undead force of nature.
However, to get there we had to have a few missteps from Hollywood horror heavy hitters like George Romero and Clive Barker who tried their hand at resurrecting the franchise in the late 1980s’. Ultimately things fell apart on both directors’ attempts for one reason or another.
Enter Sommers who had made kids’ movies for Disney in the early ’90s, but wrote and directed a fresh take on The Mummy, loosely based on the original film from 1932. The three connections the movies share are the Mummy’s name, Imhotep, Oded Fehr’s character’s name Ardeth Bay, and the plot revolving around an Egyptian priest resurrecting his ancient love. Everything else was brand-new to the Mummy’s mythos and made the movie all the better for it.
The film switches genres from the upfront focus on horror to action, concentrating more on adventurous sequences, special effects, comedy, and more flavor regarding Egyptian mythology and lore. It feels more of a throwback to adventure serials of the same time the original Mummy was a part of with Fraser’s Rick O’Connell mirroring something out of an Allan Quartermain story. The studio had originally wanted a typical leading man with the likes of Brad Pitt and Ben Affleck in the role. While those guys have proven they can be funny, it’s Fraser’s effortless take on being cool while also being willing to mock himself that makes his portrayal play out so well.
To break more stereotypes, Rachel Weisz’s wise, charming, and beautiful librarian Evelyn Carnahan proved that within every bookish girl stirs an adventurer ready to save the day–and a brilliant one, at that.
“I may not be an explorer, or an adventurer, or a treasure-seeker, or a gunfighter, Mr. O’Connell, but I am proud of what I am,” she tells Rick. When asked what that is, she replies back “I…am a librarian.”
They’re electric on-screen together. The two of them should have won the Nobel Prize in chemistry if we’re being honest.
Balancing the good, we have Arnold Vosloo as Imhotep, the malevolent Mummy himself. What a performance. Apparently, Vosloo got offered the role after one audition and it’s easy to see why. He’s leagues from Karloff’s stoic and slow-moving, calculating undead creature to a man hellbent on finding his love and his unwillingness to let anyone or anything stop him. There’s a dramatic and sinister flair in everything he does.
As previously noted, 1999 was a pivotal year for big-budget action movies as special effects were becoming an art form and more computer-generated effects were becoming more mainstream. About a fifth of the movie’s $80 million budget, roughly $15 million, was set aside exclusively for the special effects, including digital prosthetic make-up, motion capture, and stop-motion.
For The Mummy, Sommers chose to utilize both cutting-edge CGI from Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) and practical effects with the help of Oscar nominee Nick Dudman. Dudman had gotten his start as a puppeteer assistant for Yoda in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and already had a hand in several blockbusters by the time he was developing the mummies. He would also return for the sequel, The Mummy Returns. This combination helps those effects hold up to this day. It wasn’t all special effects, though. The scene with Evelyn covered in rats and locusts? Those are those actual creatures all over Weisz. Sometimes, you can’t beat the real thing.
Following its massive success at the box office, a sequel was quickly greenlit and almost 70 years later, Universal had another monster movie franchise in its cloth-wrapped hands. The Mummy Returns had more of a mixed critical reaction, but still managed to earn over than $430 at the box office. The subsequent spin-off Scorpion King franchise helped launch the movie career of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson–for better or worse–but added more monsters and magic to this already mysterious world.
Obviously, the Tom Cruise-starring reboot of The Mummy and Universal’s proposed Dark Universe was tombed pretty much on arrival. It’s hard to mess with the cosmic gumbo of what made The Mummy such a hit, but other franchises have sniped the recipe and made their own versions–and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Maybe someday we’ll finally get that Mummy 4 that’s long been rumored, maybe not, and if not–that’s okay! We have Rick and Evelyn riding off into the sands before the credits roll, and sometimes, that’s the best kind of ending.
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