Video Scripts: Scream 7, Prom Night remake, The Mummy (1999)

A fresh batch of Cody's JoBlo videos.

I have been writing news articles and film reviews for ArrowintheHead.com for several years, and for the last few years I have also been writing scripts for videos that are released through the site's YouTube channel JoBlo Horror Originals. Recently I started writing video scripts for the JoBlo Originals YouTube channel as well. I have previously shared the videos I wrote that covered 

- Frailty, Dead Calm, and Shocker 

- 100 Feet, Freddy vs. Jason, and Pin 

- Night Fare, Poltergeist III, and Hardware 

- A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, and It's Alive

- Dark City, Mute Witness, and The Wraith

- Army of Darkness, Cannibal Holocaust, and Basket Case 

- Halloween timeline, The Pit, and Body Parts

- Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, and The Thing (2011)

- The Monster Squad, Trick or Treat, and Maximum Overdrive

- A Fish Called Wanda, Night of the Creeps, and Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI

- Race with the Devil, Speed, and Romancing the Stone

- Maniac Cop 3, WarGames, and Night of the Living Dead (1990)

- The Rock, Witchboard, and Friday the 13th Part 2

- Intruder, Saving Private Ryan, and Big Trouble in Little China

- The First Power, Psycho (1960), and Hot Fuzz

- Cat People (1982), Bride of Re-Animator, and Con Air

- Moulin Rouge (2001), The Hills Have Eyes Part 2 (1985), and The Stuff

- Children of the Corn (1984), Bone Tomahawk, and Fight Club

- The Departed, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, and Ginger Snaps

- Silver Bullet, Last Action Hero, and Children of Men

- FleshEater, Christmas Vacation, and Lethal Weapon

- The Thing (1982), Monkey Shines, and Friday the 13th (1980)

- P2, Lethal Weapon 2, and Frozen (2010)

- Lethal Weapon 3, The Blob (1988), and Lethal Weapon 4

- The Fast and the Furious, Dance of the Dead, and The Rage: Carrie 2

- Puppet Master, 2 Fast 2 Furious, and Castle Freak (1995)

- The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Fast & Furious, and Halloween III: Season of the Witch

- Fast Five, Dog Soldiers, and Tremors 3: Back to Perfection

- Drag Me to Hell, 3D '80s Horror, and unmade Mission: Impossible sequels

- Sleepaway Camp, Tremors 4: The Legend Begins, and 2001 Maniacs

- Gremlins, Furious 6, and Lone Wolf McQuade

- The Last Showing, Grindhouse, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)

- Christmas Horror, Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys, and Furious 7

- Drive (2011), 1986 horror comedies, and Alien: Romulus

- Murder Party, Twisters, and Hellraiser

- Black Phone 2, Super 8, Red State

- Longlegs, The Mummy (2017), Dead-Alive

- Mission: Impossible 8, When a Stranger Calls (2006), MCU Blade

- Stardust, Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, Gladiator II

- Salem's Lot remake, Versus, Judgment Night

Three more videos that I have written the scripts for can be seen below, one for the JoBlo Upcoming Movies channel and two for the JoBlo Horror Originals channel.

A while back, I wrote an Everything We Know article on the upcoming slasher sequel Scream 7... and then that project had some major behind-the-scenes shake-ups. It's being reworked and we don't know much about the new version of the script, but some of the stuff we heard so far ended up in a video that was released through the JoBlo Upcoming Movies channel. As I've said before, these sorts of videos have a short shelf life, because soon we'll know everything there is to know about Scream 7.

For the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series, I wrote about director Nelson McCormick's 2008 remake of Prom Night: 

Prom Night script: 

It’s prom night 2008 and Donna Keppel is planning to wear a champagne-colored dress. Corseted, with pink and gold beads. Unfortunately, it might also get splattered with blood and tears, because the teacher who’s obsessed with her has broken out of the mental hospital, tracked her down to the prom venue, and is ready to make sure she’ll be his forever. Even if that means having to slaughter her friends first. That’s the story of the 2008 version of Prom Night – and if you haven’t seen this one, it might be the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw.

The Prom Night franchise began with the release of a 1980 slasher movie which starred scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis as a young woman who has to deal with a ski mask-wearing maniac crashing her prom. People are stabbed and hacked, knocked off a cliff, decapitated, throats are slit, and there’s a show-stopping disco dance to a song that tells us everything is alright on prom night. Just like Halloween, this was a Jamie Lee Curtis slasher that became popular enough to launch a franchise. But Prom Night told a contained story – so the filmmakers took an anthology approach to the three sequels that followed. Each has connections to Hamilton High School, but their stories have nothing to do with what Curtis’s character went through. The most popular of the sequels was Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2… which was developed as an original story called The Haunting of Hamilton High before getting the Prom Night 2 title dropped on it. Its story of the vengeful spirit of a long-dead prom queen, Mary Lou Maloney, went over so well, Prom Night 3: The Last Kiss was a direct follow-up. Then the Mary Lou story was ditched for Prom Night 4: Deliver Us from Evil, which was about an insane Catholic priest wiping out sinful teenagers.

The franchise sat dormant for over a decade… Until October of 2004, when Screen Gems announced they were moving forward with a new Prom Night. This was just two months after they announced their remake of When a Stranger Calls, which we covered in a previous episode. At that time, the Prom Night reboot had Stephen Susco attached to write, fresh off writing The Grudge, the English-language remake of the Japanese film Ju-on. But Susco was quickly replaced on the project by J.S. Cardone, who might not have been the most obvious choice to write a story about teenagers, since he was about sixty years old. But he did have genre experience, having written and directed the 1982 slasher The Slayer. He also contributed to some Full Moon productions, including Puppet Master, wrote and directed the vampire film The Forsaken, and was collaborating with Screen Gems on the supernatural Renny Harlin movie The Covenant. So he knew how this stuff worked.

Although Cardone was also a director, he didn’t take the directing gig on this one. Instead, the job went to prolific TV director Nelson McCormick. And the studio gave the writer and director a hurdle to clear: it was a mandate from the start that the finished film had to get a PG-13 rating. How do you reboot an R-rated slasher as a PG-13 movie? For Cardone, the answer was to approach it like it wasn’t a slasher. As he told Fangoria magazine, “What we’re trying to do with this is to go back to the thrillers from the ‘70s that were youth-oriented but more character-driven. My influences in writing this were films like Klute, the original When a Stranger Calls, and Wait Until Dark. The killings in this movie really jump out at you, like in Wait Until Dark, and we wanted an antagonist who was not a slasher or a monster.”

That antagonist is high school biology teacher Richard Fenton, who becomes obsessed with one his students, Donna Keppel. At the start of the film, Donna comes home to find that Richard is in her house. He has already killed her dad and her little brother. Then he kills her mom right in front of her. He’s caught by the police and sent to a mental institution… but three years later, he escapes. And goes after Donna again, on prom night. This movie distances itself from the other films in the franchise by the fact that its characters aren’t Hamilton High students. Instead, they attend Bridgeport High. But the prom isn’t being held at the school anyway. The venue is a large hotel – and the filmmakers wanted to go way over-the-top with how big this party is. They wanted it to be a dream prom that could only exist in a Hollywood production. So they include a line where it’s said that a rich girl on the prom committee went one hundred thousand dollars over budget and her dad had to pay for it out of his own pocket.

During the prom, Richard keeps an eye on Donna, building up to the moment when he plans to sweep her off her feet and carry her off to their happily ever after. In the meantime, he murders any of her friends that might stand in his way and also kills off some of the hotel staff when they have something he needs, like a master key card, or if they get suspicious of him. While Donna parties and Richard stalks and slashes, detectives named Winn and Nash lead the search for the escaped murderer.

Cardone and McCormick saw Richard as a Ted Bundy type. Someone who could be outwardly charming, but that’s just a facade hiding the fact that they’re a homicidal madman. So when Johnathon Schaech was cast as Richard Fenton, he did his research by reading books about Bundy and also watching a bunch of thrillers. The role of Donna Keppel went to Brittany Snow – who had a lead role on the TV show American Dreams, but this was her first chance to be the lead in a feature film. Snow was enthusiastic about the project because she was a fan of horror movies and thrillers and because she was given the opportunity to have a more hands-on role in the filmmaking process. Her opinion was taken into account in several areas, from script ideas to casting and music choices. The soundtrack she had a say in features songs by Silversun Pickups, Plain White T’s, Tokio Hotel, This Will Destroy You, and Rock Kills Kid, among others. Starting with a cover of “Time of the Season” by Ben Taylor, who was on several episodes of American Dreams.

Snow’s co-stars include Scott Porter as Donna’s boyfriend Bobby, Jessica Stroup and Dana Davis as her friends Claire and Lisa, Collins Pennie and Kelly Blatz as their boyfriends Ronnie and Michael, Brianne Davis as rich girl Crissy, who is obsessed with becoming prom queen, Kellan Lutz as her boyfriend Rick, Mary Mara as teacher Mrs. Waters, and Jessalyn Gilsig and Linden Ashby as Donna’s aunt and uncle, who take her in after the murder of her parents. James Ransone, who would go on to appear in It Chapter Two, The Black Phone, and the Sinister movies, got his horror career started by playing Detective Nash. Joshua Leonard of The Blair Witch Project shows up briefly as an ill-fated bellhop. Ming-Na Wen has a scene as Donna’s therapist. And playing Detective Winn, this movie’s version of Donald Pleasence’s Loomis character from the Halloween movies, is Idris Elba. He got a song on the soundtrack, too. Elba is also known as Mr. Me Innit and contributed the hip-hop track called “All That We Know.”

The movie starts with a sequence that was shot in Newport, Oregon, but most of the filming took place in Los Angeles. The majority of the running time is set within the Pacific Grand Hotel, and two different hotels were used to bring this fictional location to the screen. Fittingly, McCormick drew some inspiration from The Shining when it came to the set design. And when it was time for Paul Haslinger of Tangerine Dream to compose the score, McCormick wanted him to follow the example of High Tension. He didn’t want there to be too much music. Just enough to foreshadow or telegraph what was going to happen. Sudden, effective sounds.

This Prom Night was produced on a budget of twenty million. And it made that back on opening weekend, when it opened at number one with a haul of twenty-point-eight million. It would go on to pull in a worldwide total of around fifty-seven million. A pretty good number. It wasn’t enough to get Screen Gems to greenlight a sequel… but this appears to be a rare case where the filmmakers weren’t thinking franchise. This was seen as a one-and-done deal with a definitive ending. Screen Gems was happy enough with the result that they sent the team of Cardone and McCormick right back to work on another update of an ‘80s classic. Their remake of The Stepfather reached theatres the following year.

Given that this was the fifth Prom Night movie, it’s a shame that the series hasn’t continued in some way. We should have gotten one or two more of these, at least, in the years since this movie was released. But it’s understandable that no one else has wanted to touch the franchise since then. To say that Prom Night 2008 was not warmly received would be an understatement. According to Rotten Tomatoes, only nine percent of the critic reviews were positive. The audience score wasn’t much better, coming in at just thirty-eight percent positive.

A lot of horror fans were put off by that studio-mandated rating. When MovieWeb asked Brittany Snow if she thought horror fans might be let down by a PG-13 version of Prom Night, she said, “The misconception is that everyone thinks it’s a remake. It’s not, so I hope people don’t get disappointed going in thinking they’re going to see the same sort of storyline as the original. It’s just the same name. This is a totally different take on what the whole Prom Night story is. It has veered off into being more of a psychological cat and mouse game, diving into the anticipation factor. Feeling for the characters and being scared for them.” Still, it was marketed as a remake, causing it to be directly compared to the original film. And fans just weren’t on board with seeing Prom Night get watered down for a PG-13 rating.

The movie does pale in comparison to the original… but when you take into account the three sequels that came in between the films, it starts to look a lot better. If this had simply been sold as another sequel, it probably would have been met with more positivity. Because even though the filmmakers distanced themselves from the idea of it being a slasher, describing it as a psychological thriller… it’s actually a pretty good slasher movie. Sure, we don’t see as much of the kills as we should have. The movie would have benefited from an R rating that would have allowed us to see some gore. Richard Fenton does a whole lot of stabbing people and slitting throats, but we only see some blood and plunging blades. If they had Tom Savini level FX work in here, it would have a lot more fans. But even though the kills aren’t as satisfying as they could have been, there’s a respectable body count. There could have been more kills – there are characters who slip through unscathed here but would have been knocked off in most other movies, but it has a good amount of murder and mayhem nonetheless. By the time we reach the end credits, Richard’s victim count is in the double digits. So there are plenty of death scenes to keep things interesting.

The most elaborate chase sequences are often reserved for the final girl, but in this case, the honor goes to Lisa. Richard chases her to a floor of the hotel that’s undergoing renovations. And for a few minutes, he stalks her through the empty rooms, searching for her among the exposed beams and hanging plastic. At one point, Ronnie arrives on the elevator and calls out for Lisa… but she can’t respond, because Richard is standing right beside her with his knife. It’s a great suspense sequence.

Between the kills, there’s some decent character work. Donna has a strong support system around her. Claire and Lisa are given their own side plots to deal with, but it’s also clear that they care about Donna and what she’s going through. The characters have deeper friendships and tighter bonds than we usually see in movies like this. Bobby is also one of the best and most supportive boyfriends ever seen in a horror movie, which makes the viewer more concerned for him. He’s so nice, he’s probably going to die. Brittany Snow was a great choice for the heroine role. And Johnathon Schaech delivers a creepy performance as the homicidal man who’s after her heart.

The Prom Night remake or reboot or just another Prom Night movie… whatever you want to call it… isn’t an overlooked classic, but if you set aside any expectations based on previous entries in the franchise, it does make for an entertaining viewing experience. It’s a fun thriller with some nice character work and several slashings. Then it all wraps up in just eighty-nine minutes. So, no more feeling uptight. This prom night, follow Donna Keppel and Richard Fenton to the Pacific Grand Hotel. You won’t see any disco dancing, but everything is still alright.

And for the WTF Happened to This Horror Movie series, I dug into the making of writer/director Stephen Sommer's 1999 version of The Mummy:

The Mummy script: 

From the 1930s into the ‘50s, Universal brought the horror genre some of its greatest icons. Dracula. Frankenstein’s Monster. The Wolf Man. The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The Invisible Man. The Mummy. The studio has returned to these characters multiple times over the decades. But the one that has had the most successful revival was the Mummy, who was brought back to the screen in a family friendly adventure film in 1999. A film that mixed monsters with Indiana Jones style action… and became a blockbuster that’s now seen as a beloved classic. So let’s take a look back at the making of The Mummy ‘99 and find out What the F*ck Happened to This Horror Movie.

To properly cover The Mummy, we first have to flash back to 1922. That’s when the discovery – and the opening – of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb captured the world’s imagination. The unearthing of the mummy caught so much attention at the time… and got so many people talking about the tomb being cursed… that it lingered in the minds of Universal executives a decade later. Looking for a good follow-up to the success of Dracula and Frankenstein, producer Carl Laemmle Jr. focused on finding an Egyptian-themed horror story. Story editor Richard Schayer and writer Nina Wilcox Putnam instead delivered a short treatment inspired by Italian occultist Cagliostro, who they envisioned as a three thousand year old magician causing trouble in 1930s San Francisco, terrorizing women who remind him of his ex-lover. Laemmle was satisfied enough with the story to hire John L. Balderston to expand it into a screenplay. And Balderston, who had covered the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb as a newspaper journalist, was the one who worked in Egyptian elements.

Balderston moved the setting to Egypt and replaced Cagliostro with Egyptian high priest Imhotep. He gave this fellow a tragic back story: thousands of years ago, Imhotep was in love with the princess Ankh-es-en-Amon, who passed away at a young age. The distraught Imhotep tried to use a spell from the Scroll of Thoth to resurrect his lost love. But he was caught and mummified alive for this sacrilege. When his tomb is unearthed by archaeologists in 1921, the Scroll of Thoth is found with him. And when the spell on it is read aloud, Imhotep’s mummy is returned to life. For the next decade, Imhotep passes himself off as a historian named Ardath Bey while searching for Ankh-es-en-Amon’s tomb. Then he meets a young woman who resembles the princess and comes to believe she has been reincarnated. So Imhotep intends to fully bring back Ankh-es-en-Amon by killing, mummifying, and resurrecting her doppelganger.

The 1932 version of The Mummy was a box office success that launched a franchise, but it went dormant in the ‘50s, and Universal didn’t think about reviving it until the late ‘80s. That’s when producers James Jacks and Sean Daniel talked the studio into putting a new take on the concept into development. At first, Universal was only willing to put up a budget of ten to fifteen million dollars, and many filmmakers attempted to come up with an idea that would meet the studio’s approval. As The Mummy made its way through development hell, it passed through the hands of Creepshow director George A. Romero. Hellraiser creator Clive Barker. Frequent Stephen King collaborator Mick Garris. Gremlins director Joe Dante. Screenwriters Abbie Bernstein, Alan Ormsby, and John Sayles. Romero again. Garris again. Some drafts had an unstoppable, Terminator-like mummy seeking an ancient device that can destroy all life on the planet. Another had an Egyptian tomb recreated in modern Beverly Hills. Some were a ‘90s update of the original, 1932 film that featured not only Imhotep, but also the mummy Kharis, the star of the original sequels. For one reason or another, Universal was never satisfied. For example, they felt Barker’s version was too perverted. And when Dante wanted to raise the budget in hopes of casting Daniel Day-Lewis as Imhotep, that was a no-go. Then the idea came about to make the movie a 1920s period piece, and suddenly Universal decided that it shouldn’t be a low budget horror movie after all. It should be a big budget action adventure film.

Tombstone writer Kevin Jarre was hired to write the period piece adventure version of the concept. Jarre did get a story credit on the finished film, alongside Lloyd Fonvielle, who had also written a non-Universal version of The Bride of Frankenstein in the ‘80s. But the final draft of the screenplay was written by Stephen Sommers, who had been a fan of the original Mummy since he first saw it at the age of eight in the early ‘70s. Sommers was aware that Universal had been pushing a new Mummy through development hell for ten years, and he was interested in getting involved, but it always had a different filmmaker attached, so he couldn’t get close to it. Sommers was best known at the time for writing Disney productions like The Adventures of Huck Finn, Tom and Huck, and The Jungle Book, but he also directed a creature feature called Deep Rising that was released in ‘98. When he saw a window of opportunity to get involved with The Mummy as writer/director, he took his pitch to Universal. And they gave him the job.

Sommers told Starlog that he was interested in The Mummy because, “Frankenstein made me sad—I always felt sorry for him. Dracula was kind of cool and sexy. But the Mummy just plain scared me.” As for his vision for the film, he has described it as “a kind of Indiana Jones or Jason and the Argonauts with the Mummy as the creature giving the hero a hard time.” He wanted to take what he loved about the original film and recreate it on a larger scale, while also working in elements from the 1940 film The Mummy’s Hand. And he wanted to bring the world a mummy that was faster, meaner, and scarier than ever before. As he said to Cinefantastique, “I wanted to do an epic, romantic adventure. And I also suggested we had to have Industrial Light and Magic create our Mummy. I didn’t want a guy wrapped in bandages. I wanted to take a real human being and turn him into a corpse, then turn him from a corpse back into a human being.” He was bored with the limitations of practical effects and wanted to dazzle viewers with what CGI could do.

The story Sommers crafted for The Mummy begins three thousand years ago, when Imhotep was high priest to Pharaoh Seti the First… and in love with the Pharaoh’s mistress, Anck-su-namun. When their forbidden love was discovered, they killed Seti. Faced with punishment by the Medjai, the Pharaoh’s bodyguards, Anck-su-namun then killed herself. A minor inconvenience for Imhotep, who can resurrect her with the Book of the Dead. Problem is, he is caught in the middle of the process. He was mummified alive and covered with scarabs… but if his tomb is ever opened, this undead mummy will be released as an invincible being with the power to control the sands. Jump ahead to the 1920s. Treasure hunting thief Jonathan Carnahan and his klutzy librarian sister Evie are seeking Hamunaptra, the City of the Dead, a necropolis that also happened to be the place where the Pharaohs would hide away the wealth of Egypt. So they hire American adventurer Rick O’Connell, who found the city while fighting with the French Foreign Legion years earlier, to lead them there. Another group of fortune hunters, led by Beni Gabor, is also heading to the city. And the Medjai, including Ardeth Bay, try to thwart their progress. No one lets the Medjai deter them. Hamunaptra is located. Imhotep’s tomb is unearthed. He is resurrected and unleashed… and he sets out to resurrect Anck-su-namun by sacrificing Evie. A plan that doesn’t go over well with Evie and Jonathan, or with Rick, who has fallen in love with Evie during their time together.

So Rick does his best to rescue the damsel in distress, kill the bad guy, and save the world. And viewers get to witness comedy-tinged horror action. That involves deadly scarabs, the walking dead, a massive sandstorm, and the ten plagues of Egypt. Water turns to blood, fiery hail falls on Cairo, and those infected with the plague of boils and sores become mindless zombies. Sommers packed so much CGI-enhanced action into his film, Universal had to boost the budget all the way up to eighty million dollars. Fifteen million of that went into the special effects.

Online trivia claims the producers were interested in casting Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, or Ben Affleck as Rick O’Connell. Maybe even Sylvester Stallone. But none of those were options as far as Sommers was concerned. While he was still writing the script, his editor Bob Ducsay suggested Brendan Fraser, and the suggestion stuck. Fraser got the offer and accepted it, bringing Rick to life as a man of action who is equal parts tough guy and goofball. The studio was hoping an American actress would be cast as Evie. Ashley Judd was on their wish list. But Sommers felt the character should be British, so Rachel Weisz got the job. John Hannah was cast as her brother Jonathan, with Kevin J. O’Connor as Beni. Sommers had envisioned Ardeth Bay as being an older Black man, someone like James Earl Jones or Roscoe Lee Browne. But that vision changed when he met 20-something Israeli actor Oded Fehr. Patricia Velásquez was cast as Anck-su-namun. Erick Avari and Jonathan Hyde landed supporting roles. The title villain Imhotep was played by Arnold Vosloo, who had previously worked with the producers on the Jean-Claude Van Damme classic Hard Target. While this take on The Mummy has a sense of humor that sometimes leans toward being cartoony, Vosloo’s approach was to play his role entirely straight. He said that, “From Imhotep’s point of view, this is a skewed version of Romeo and Juliet.”

When Imhotep first rises from his tomb, he’s a dried-out corpse… but he regenerates as he kills, sucking the life force out of his victims. Soon enough, it’s Vosloo in the flesh – and he shows so much flesh, the actor had to slim down before filming began.

Some sequences of The Mummy were shot in England, including at Shepperton Studios, where the scenes that take place in the City of the Dead were filmed. It took the construction crew sixteen weeks to put those sets together. A large portion of the production took place in Morocco and out in the Sahara desert – which wasn’t an easy location to deal with. Filming would frequently be shut down by sandstorms that cast and crew had to endure while wearing earplugs and goggles. Some crew members had to be airlifted to medical care after being stung or bitten by the local wildlife. And Sommers admits that they beat the crap out of Brendan Fraser with the stunts and action.

There was a major scare when Fraser performed the scene where Rick is nearly executed by hanging. As Sommers described it to The Hollywood Reporter, “Usually when somebody gets hung, it’s a dummy, and that’s why they put bags over people’s heads. Brendan was always gung-ho, and he was like, ‘Make the noose really tight on me.’ Then he decided to let his knees sag a little bit. But what he forgot is that the minute you put that much pressure on your carotid arteries, it knocks you out. We all looked, and he’s completely unconscious. It was fine, and he recovered in ten seconds. But he woke up like, ‘What happened?’” Thankfully, Fraser came out of it okay. And willing to come back for sequels.

Universal ended up pumping more money into The Mummy than they expected to, but it paid off in the long run. While some horror fans might be put off by the film’s silly sense of humor, it seemed to go over very well with the average movie-goer. Released in May of 1999, Stephen Sommer’s version of The Mummy became a global blockbuster. The title character had been the laughing stock of the Universal Monsters for years. A lot of people would joke about the mummy not being scary, shambling along in his bandages. But while there is some bandage-wrapped mummy action in this movie, that’s not all there is to Imhotep. He is an extremely powerful being – and audiences enjoyed watching Rick O’Connell try to take him down while overcoming everything Imhotep throws his way.

Any one of the filmmakers who were attached to this project before Sommers could have made an interesting, potentially great Mummy movie. But Universal backed Sommers’ vision – and there’s no denying it was a success. The Mummy earned over one hundred and fifty-seven million dollars at the domestic box office, with another two hundred and sixty-one million coming from international screenings, bringing its total haul to just over four hundred and eighteen million. A franchise was born. The sequel The Mummy Returns followed in 2001, and that launched a spin-off franchise with The Scorpion King, which got multiple follow-ups. Another Mummy sequel, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, came along in 2008… And for a while, Universal was developing a fourth Rick O’Connell mummy adventure that would have been called The Mummy: Rise of the Aztec. But that idea was scrapped in favor of rebooting the franchise with a new film that would kick off a cinematic universe, a series of interconnected Universal Monsters reboots where the monsters would share the screen. The Dark Universe. But that universe fell apart when the 2017 version of The Mummy, which starred Tom Cruise, was a box office disappointment. It actually made about the same amount of money as The Mummy 1999 did. Problem was, the budget was substantially higher.

Other Mummy movies have come and gone since, but The Mummy 1999 wasn’t just a summer hit that then faded away. It has a legion of fans that, over the decades, have come to see it as an enduring classic. People remember having fun seeing it when it was first released. There’s a generation of kids who grew up watching it. For many, this was the gateway movie that got them into the horror genre. And a lot of fans are hoping we’ll get to see Brendan Fraser play Rick O’Connell again, even if it’s just for one more time. That may or may not happen, but in the meantime we can still go back and watch his first Mummy adventure again and again. And while some of the CGI effects look dated now, the movie is still as entertaining as it was in the summer of ‘99.

More video scripts have been written, so another batch of videos will be shared here on Life Between Frames eventually. In the meantime, keep an eye on JoBlo Horror Originals and JoBlo Originals!