Alex Kurtzman teases Princess Ahmanet’s backstory in The Mummy

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Although what I’ve seen from THE MUMMY hasn’t completely won me over, I’m still more than willing to give Universal’s rebooted Monsters franchise a chance. Two thousand years after she was buried alive beneath the sand of Egypt, the tomb of Princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella) is discovered by Nick Morton (Tom Cruise), leading to her resurrection as she unleashes her fury upon the modern world. But what led to Princess Ahmanet setting off on this malevolent path? THE MUMMY director Alex Kurtzman spoke with Entertainment Weekly and gave a little more detail on the character’s backstory.

Kurtzman revealed that Princess Ahmanet’s father had promised to make her pharaoh, but when his wife bore him a son, he reneged on that promise, leading to Ahmanet taking her harsh and bloody revenge. Obviously that didn’t go all that well for her as she spent the next few millennia trapped in a sarcophagus, but what can you do? A promise is a promise.  Alex Kurtzman added that Ahmanet is “a woman who wasn’t content to be put in her place and wanted something more.“

Despite THE MUMMY serving as our introduction to the Universal Monsters Universe, Kurtzman cautions us not to expect a Universal Monsters version of THE AVENGERS right away. “The movie’s called The Mummy, not The Mummy Meets 12 Other Monsters,” Kurtzman said. “If we create a world that feels interesting and scary, then we will have succeeded in setting up the larger universe.” We’ll get a hint of that larger universe when Russell Crowe appears as Dr. Henry Jekyll, but Chris Morgan (THE FATE OF THE FURIOUS), who heads up the Universal Monsters writers’ room along with Kurtzman, recently said that they’ve designed these movies to “be kind of standalone sorts of franchises that have kind of similar things between them.“

Entertainment Weekly also debuted a new image from THE MUMMY which showcases Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) meeting Princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella) after he’s woken up in a body bag following a plane crash. As they’re both already dead at this point, Kurtzman says that Morton is “realizing that he’s deeply, and desperately, cursed.” Click to embiggen!

THE MUMMY is set for a June 9, 2017 release.