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Brendan Fraser knows how to save The Mummy franchise and is up for a return

October 17th, 2022 by Marc Comments

Oh, man, if there was ever an installment in a long-though dead franchise I wanted to see, this is it!

Brendan Fraser was the world’s action hero for a brief period in the late 90s/early 2000s when he starred in The Mummy franchise, spanning three movies between 1999 and 2008. And, sure, he’s acted in other things since then – I met him in Belfast about ten years ago and he’s a really lovely chap -but he more or less faded into relative obscurity.

Until recently.

He bounced onto our radar a few years back in 2018 when he took the role of Cliff Steele/Robot Man in Doom Patrol and, from there, he’s just been around A LOT.

Currently getting all the praise for Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, he also has Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon coming up, not to mention the fact we almost had him as Firefly in the canceled Batgirl movie.

So, yeah, we now live in the second coming of Brendan Fraser and that’s fine by us.

But one thing the star seems keen on is returning to the series that made him a household name, especially after the great Tom Cruise couldn’t even get it off the ground again… The Mummy.

Cruise starred in the reboot that was set to kick off a new era of Universal Monsters called Dark Universe in 2017. The movie, if I’m honest, was actually ok, but it fell short of Fraser’s adventures and the star knows why.

“I don’t know how it would work,” the star says, “But I’d be open to it if someone came up with the right concept.”

On the failure of the 2017 reboot, he says: “It is hard to make that movie.

“The ingredient that we had going for our Mummy, which I didn’t see in that film, was fun. That was what was lacking in that incarnation. It was too much of a straight-ahead horror movie. The Mummy should be a thrill ride, but not terrifying and scary.”

While I did enjoy Cruise’s movie and was looking forward to Dark Universe and what it could mean, going forward, Fraser is right – I remember watching the movie at the time and thinking I would not be letting my kids see it as it was pretty full-on in parts, compared to Fraser’s version which was an Indian Jones-lite family fun ride.

Personally, with Fraser now in his 50s and looking more like an average guy than the chiselled hero he was back in the day, I’d love to see him come back and see how his character,  Rick O’Connell, would handle the supernatural scourge now that he’s a big older, a bit heavier and a bit out of his element.

That sounds like a cracking ride to me.

Right, universal, get on it!

Source: Variety

Marc is a self-confessed nerd. Ever since seeing Star Wars for the first time around 1979 he’s been an unapologetic fan of the Wars and still believes, with Clone Wars and now Underworld, we are yet to see the best Star Wars. He’s a dad of two who now doesn’t have the time (or money) to collect the amount of toys, comics, movies and books he once did, much to the relief of his long-suffering wife. In the real world he’s a graphic designer. He started Following the Nerd because he was tired of searching a million sites every day for all the best news that he loves and decided to create one place where you can go to get the whole lot. Secretly he longs to be sitting in the cockpit of his YT-1300 Corellian Transport ship with his co-pilot Chewie, roaming the universe, waiting for his next big adventure, but feels just at home watching cartoons with his kids….