Lee Cronin shuts down The Mummy name-change rumors

Let’s be honest — with another Evil Dead just lurching into cinemas, it makes Lee Cronin’s The Mummy look even more peculiar in hindsight. If you caught this version of The Mummy, you might’ve noticed it doesn’t really stick to that dusty, bandaged classic monster feel. In fact, it’s got more in common with Evil Dead than anything Boris Karloff ever touched. Personally, I wasn’t madly in love with Cronin’s take, but fair’s fair, it does occasionally remember it’s dealing with a mummy – a monster I’ll die on a hill declaring one of the most criminally overlooked in the classic horror roster. It’s just that every time it ramps up the spookiness, you can nearly see the Necronomicon lurking in the background, winking at you.

So, here’s the interesting bit: joblo.com sat down with Lee Cronin for a chat about all this. Turns out, Cronin actually turned down the chance to do another Evil Dead in favour of making his own stamp on The Mummy. Now, last year, there was this rumour flying about — studio panic, apparently, over his film’s title. The story went that people might confuse his film with the freshly-announced Brendan Fraser Mummy IV, and that execs wanted Cronin to rebrand the lot.

According to Cronin, though, the idea of a name-change was never seriously on the table. He reckons the story grew legs all on its own, and any actual talk at the studio level was nothing more than a whisper that snowballed into industry gossip. Here’s what he said when asked if there’d ever been genuine discussions about dropping ‘The Mummy’:

'Absolutely not. The film was always The Mummy. It’s one of those things — someone wonders aloud in an office and suddenly the internet’s got a new headline. Never got close to happening.'

The Story, If You Missed It

Here’s the rough outline: straight after Evil Dead Rise gave the box office a jolt, Cronin switched gears for his next film – and went for broke reinventing The Mummy. This isn’t ancient Egypt, sarcophagi, and plagues of locusts – the drama kicks off when the young daughter of a journalist vanishes without warning into the desert. Eight years vanish as well. Then, out of nowhere, the family get the shock of their lives when she resurfaces, and, well, let’s say things only get weirder from there.