Director of Mama In Talks for Mummy Reboot, Isn’t Typecasting the Worst?

I look forward to his future projects, Mommy, Maman, and Marmee. But on a more serious note, here’s a ray of hope that Universal’s reboot of the Mummy series won’t be the gritty, soulless re-imagining that nobody asked for.

Universal first announced that they were gathering talent to start a new The Mummy franchise produced by the folks who worked on the last one a year ago, fans of the Brendan Fraser/Rachel Weisz-lead version franchise raised their eyebrows skeptically. Hollywood seems to have a particular difficulty these days with producing action adventure film that rides that line of being purposefully goofy and fun without insulting it’s audience’s intelligence or merely insulting its audience. Even the Pirates of the Caribbean series seems to have lost its mojo on that particular front.

Folks at Universal quickly clarified that this was going to be a fresh take on making references to an eighty year old film, an action-adventure film with horror elements in a modern setting, possibly with a scientific (rather than magical) explanation for the Mummy’s rise from the crypt. “Oh,” I said to myself, “so a real reboot,” and stopped paying attention. At least, until now, when Andres Muschietti is reportedly in talks to take the director’s helm.

Muschietti was the Guillermo del Toro approved director of MAMA, a horror film that played expertly and knowingly with a number of the horror genre’s most well used tropes about motherhood and femininity. A The Mummy movie that’s actually scary, delivered by someone who isn’t a stranger to subverting female character cliches is something that could well be up our alley. Details on the script are being kept very quiet, but as Muschietti was largely unknown outside of Spanish cinema before MAMA, it’s not unlikely that there’s something in this new Mummy film that made Universal think of MAMA.

(via The Hollywood Reporter.)