Lee Cronin made a name for himself inhorrorcircles with 2023’sEvil Dead Rise. Now, New Line’s tapped him to write and directThe Mummy, releasing August 19, 2025.
The Hollywood Reporterbroke the story. In a statement, Lee said:
This will be unlike anyMummymovie you ever laid eyeballs on before. I’m digging deep into the earth to raise something very ancient and very frightening.
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The Production Team Is A Good One
The production team is Lee’s own company, Doppelgängers, along with the formidable duo of Atomic Monster and Blumhouse. If those names don’t mean anything to you, they should.
Atomic Monster belongs tohorror darlingJames Wan, director ofSaw,Insidious,The Conjuring,Furious 7, andAquaman. He’s produced over 30 mainstream films.
Jason Blum’sBlumhouseProductions has essentially defined horror cinema in the 21st century. Their first breakthrough was 2009’sParanormal Activity. In the last 14 years, they’ve helped create:
Blumhouse even helped produce Damien Chazelle’sWhiplash. Which is crazy. According to Chazelle, in an interview withSlash Film:
For instance, the people who wound up producing “Whiplash,” the folks at Blumhouse, who wound up being … why was Blumhouse on “Whiplash”? In some ways, that doesn’t feel like an obvious connection. Well, that was because I got to know some of the Blumhouse folks by pitching, I think it was “Ouija.” I was pitching as a writer on “Ouija,” or maybe it was “Paranormal Activity 5” or “6,” or one of those. Anyway, didn’t get those assignments, but got to know one of the producers at Blumhouse, Cooper Samuelson, and gave him “Whiplash,” et cetera, et cetera.
IsThe MummyConnected To The Brendan Fraser/Tom CruiseMummyMovies?
The 2017The Mummy,starring Tom Cruise, was a reboot of Brendan Fraser’s 1999 hit (which was based on the 1932Mummy).All of those films had a conceptual connection because Universal Pictures made each one.
After Cruise’s film failed to land with audiences, Universal pivoted to small-to-mid-budget productions. The first was Blumhouse’sThe Invisible Man(one of my favorite movies of 2020). Blumhouse has a version ofWolf Manreleasing in 2025.Renfield,The Last Voyage of the Demeter, andAbigailwere all part of this new strategy (but not Blumhouse productions).
New Line Cinema is part of Warner Bros., so despite Blumhouse’s connection to Universal, this will be a completely fresh interpretation of the famous mummy figure.
What Should We Expect From Lee Cronin’sMummy?
Tom Cruise’sMummywas an attempt to create a Marvel-like Monsterverse. So the scope and scale of the film was appropriately outlandish and blockbuster-y. You have zombies in the London Underground. Russell Crowe plays Dr. Jekyll. It’s over the top.
Fraser’s stayed in Egypt but was also an over the top production, maybe even the blueprint for Disney’sThe Pirates of the Caribbean. Fraser, wielding a sword, fights a legion of undead warriors.
While Blumhouse and Atomic Monster have made bigger productions, I would assume they’re less interested in action-adventure and more into “the room is completely dark, and we hear something shuffling towards us.” A monster that terrorizes a protagonist rather than a god-like final boss a team of heroes must defeat.
