For over a decade, a reboot of the classic Universal Monsters property The Mummy languished in development hell. The project was originally intended to be a dark, low budget horror story. Then executives decided it should be a larger budgeted adventure film. So in 1999, writer/director Stephen Sommers delivered a version of The Mummy that was packed with action, adventure, humor… and some creepy mummy stuff. It was a massive box office success – so, of course, a sequel was put on the fast track to production. And now we’re going to look back more than twenty years to find out What the F*ck Happened to The Mummy Returns.
Getting the ‘99 Mummy to the screen had been a long, painful process. Many different writers and directors had come and gone before Stephen Sommers got involved. Getting The Mummy Returns made was much easier. And the process began on the first movie’s opening weekend. Made on a budget of eighty million dollars, The Mummy had to earn around two hundred to two hundred and fifty million at the box office to be considered a success. Sommers was keeping his expectations in check, hoping for an opening weekend of twenty million. But on Saturday morning, he got a call from the president of Universal, who told him it looked like they would have an opening weekend of forty-five million. So Saturday night, cast and crew got together for a celebratory steak dinner. They already had a hit on their hands!
And then it was time to start thinking sequel. The Mummy marched its way to a worldwide box office total of four hundred and seventeen million. Universal reached out to Sommers and the film’s stars Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz about coming back for another adventure… Sommers said, “When you decide to make a sequel, everyone has to agree on two things: it’s going to be better and it’s going to be bigger.” They all agreed that they would only make a follow-up if it could be an improvement over its predecessor. Fraser even held off on signing a contract, saying he wanted to see the script first. A decision that Sommers totally agreed with. He even directly told Fraser, “If I can’t pull off a script, use that excuse to get out of it.” And if Fraser wouldn’t agree to be in the movie, Sommers could use that as his escape hatch, too. Because he refused to make a Mummy sequel without Fraser.
So Sommers spent six or seven weeks writing the first draft of The Mummy Returns. While doing research for the first movie, he had looked back as far as 1200 B.C. Looking for an idea for the sequel, he continued going further back into the past. And found inspiration in 3000 B.C: the story of a pharaoh called the Scorpion King, who had united Upper and Lower Egypt. Then he heaped a lot of fiction on top of the idea of someone being called the Scorpion King. So the story begins in 3067 B.C., when the Scorpion King led an army on a campaign to conquer the known world. That didn’t work out. They were defeated and driven out into the desert of Ahm Shere. Where they died, one-by-one, until only the Scorpion King remained. To survive, he made a pact with the dark god Anubis, offering his soul in exchange for the chance to get revenge on his enemies. Anubis saved him by creating an oasis in the desert. Then let him lead his army of supernatural jackal monsters. Once that army had conquered the Scorpion King’s enemies, they were all drawn back into the Underworld. There they have waited for five thousand years… But 1933 A.D. happens to be the Year of the Scorpion, when the Scorpion King will rise from the Underworld and use the army of Anubis to destroy mankind.
In the seven years since the events of the first film, treasure hunter Rick O’Connell and Egyptologist Evelyn Carnahan have gotten married. And they now have a young son named Alex… because annoying little kids are a common element of adventure movies. Evelyn has been having dreams and visions, glimpses from a past life. When she was Nefertiti, the daughter of Pharaoh Seti I – you know, the guy the villains betrayed and murdered in flashbacks shown in the first movie. Along with these memories, Evelyn is also gaining Nefertiti’s fighting skills, which is a nice bonus. The visions lead her to the Bracelet of Anubis, which can guide the wearer to the Lost Oasis of Ahm Shere. The place where the Scorpion King and his army will rise. Problem is, the bracelet gets stuck on Alex’s arm. So when the bad guys show up, they kidnap the kid so he can lead them to the oasis.
Disciples of the mummy Imhotep have resurrected him. The plan being to take him to the oasis so he can battle and defeat the Scorpion King. And then rule the world. One of these disciples is Meela Nais, who looks just like Anck-su-namun, who was Imhotep’s lover in ancient Egypt. He was going to sacrifice Evelyn in an effort to resurrect Anck-su-namun in the first movie. It turns out to be much easier to just transfer Anck-su-namun’s soul into Meela’s body. It’s a shame he didn’t meet her in the first movie, it would have saved everyone a lot of trouble.
Rick and Evelyn follow Alex and the bad guys to the oasis. Accompanied by Evelyn’s con man brother Jonathan. Rick’s dirigible-flying buddy Izzy. And the Medjai warrior Ardeth Bay, a returning character from the first film. He was meant to die by the end credits of that movie, but Sommers decided to spare him during production. Then gave him an expanded role in the sequel. Everything leads up to a climactic battle where Ardeth Bay and the Medjai take on the army of Anubis. While Rick, Evelyn, and Jonathan have to deal with Imhotep, Anck-su-namun… and, yes, the resurrected Scorpion King. Who is now a monstrous creature.
Sommers’ first draft was enough to get Fraser excited about the project. Fraser gave some notes – and when he saw the second draft, he officially signed on. The Mummy Returns was a done deal at that point. Weisz came back as Evelyn, with John Hannah returning as Jonathan. Arnold Vosloo as Imhotep. Oded Fehr as Ardeth Bay. And Patricia Velásquez as Anck-su-namun. The most prominent of the new cast members is nine-year-old Freddie Boath. Who had the chance to work on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone as well, but decided to pass it up. He did some TV work after this, but The Mummy Returns ended up being his only film role. Now he works in marketing and advertising. Shaun Parkes was cast as Izzy Buttons. And another major new cast member was Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. A professional wrestler whose previous acting credits were just a few TV appearances.
Sommers told The Hollywood Reporter he had never heard of Johnson before he came up for the role of the Scorpion King. He said, “They sent me some footage of him, and he was just perfect. I had to shoot so fast with him because he flew into Marrakesh on Wednesday, and he had to be in Detroit for a WWE thing on Saturday. But boy, was he a trooper. As soon as the studio saw the dailies, the president of Universal was calling me up and saying, ‘You got to write a movie for him.’ Somehow over the next week or so, I came up with this idea that became the Scorpion King movie.” The Scorpion King prequel film was released in 2002. It only made half of what the Mummy movies made at the box office… But that was enough to launch a direct-to-video franchise consisting of four prequels and sequels. None of which starred Johnson.
Johnson was only on the set of The Mummy Returns for the opening sequence that shows the Scorpion King back story. When his character returns at the end, he’s entirely CGI… And not very convincing CGI. Viewers have been making fun of this computer-generated monstrosity ever since the movie reached theatres. As Fraser told GQ, “I never met Dwayne until after the premiere because he was a piece of tape on a stick that we referred to. Of course, they put him in CGI later. The guys who did the CGI of the Scorpion King, I saw them at the premiere and they were like, ‘Hey, how are you? We did the Scorpion King CGI. Yeah, we needed a little more time. It was very last minute.’ Some of the charm of it now is… it could get remastered, I guess, but it wouldn’t be as fun if you didn’t see this janky video game character of Dwayne. It’s somehow just perfect how it works.”
Fraser said that, for the actors, working on The Mummy Returns was like returning for another semester of college with friends. They had just done the first movie, now they were doing the same things for this one. For Sommers, it was more difficult. By making the sequel bigger than its predecessor, he made it more complex to direct. As he explained to Fangoria, “There are a lot more special effects and computer-generated characters in this movie. Because I’ve learned so much, I know how to integrate them even more. But it was just more mind-bending, trying to cover sequences. Like you’ve got six actors and a bunch of invisible CG characters and you’re trying to figure out how to cover them with three cameras. We’ll be shooting a scene for nine straight days in every possible direction, and the only person who can keep it together is me. It’s like somebody’s given me this big pile of puzzle pieces and I have to put the whole puzzle back together with the help of a hundred people. But I’m the only one who knows what it’s supposed to look like at the end.”
The Mummy Returns filmed for one hundred and two days in Morocco and London. One of the most complicated sequences to film was the bus chase. Where characters fight off mummies while driving a bus through London, toward the Tower Bridge. Not only was it freezing cold and pouring rain while they were shooting… but they could only shut down London traffic for fifteen to twenty minutes every hour. This was so disruptive, there was a chance the authorities would pull their filming permit and send them away. But they got the footage they needed.
While writing the script, Sommers made sure to bring back elements that viewers had enjoyed in the first movie. Soldier mummies for Rick and his cohorts to fight. Killer scarabs. Imhotep showing off his supernatural abilities – this time taking control of water instead of sand. And he also worked in new creatures. Like the army of Anubis. And a tribe of pygmy skeletons that attack the characters in one sequence. The pygmy skeletons were an idea he had when writing the first movie, but there was no way to work them into that one. So they get their chance to shine in the sequel.
Sommers always likes to include a lot of humor in his films. This was evident in The Mummy, where there was so much humor in the script, the actors weren’t sure how to approach it. They were always wondering, “Is this a mummy horror movie or is this a comedy?” On the sequel, they knew the tone and how to play it. And while Sommers was aiming to make The Mummy Returns scarier and creepier, that doesn’t really come off in the finished film. It seems even goofier than the first movie. Like the humor was enhanced along with the action sequences.
By the time production wrapped, Sommers was tired to his core. He was ready to focus on making smaller movies. Comedies. And he was already saying that if there was a third Mummy movie, he would write and produce it, but not direct it. And that’s pretty much what ended up happening.
Universal Pictures brought The Mummy Returns to the screen on May 4, 2001. Three days shy of the first movie’s two year anniversary. And it surpassed the first movie’s worldwide box office haul. It was made on a budget eighteen million dollars higher than The Mummy’s; it cost ninety-eight million. And its box office was also eighteen million higher; it made four-hundred and thirty-five million. The opening weekend totals were record breakers. With twenty-three-point-four million on Friday and twenty-six-point-eight million on Saturday, it became the record holder for highest Friday and Saturday grosses. But it only held those records for a short time before other 2001 releases took them away. The weekend total of sixty-eight-point-one million made it the second-highest opening weekend of all time. Coming in behind The Lost World: Jurassic Park. That’s another record it lost long ago. But the finances were good, even if The Mummy Returns received more negative reviews than The Mummy had.
The monetary success was, indeed, enough to get a sequel greenlit. But the next one took longer to come together. Directed by Rob Cohen from a script by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, with Sommers on board as producer, the third Mummy film wasn’t released until 2008. In the meantime, we got two seasons of the O’Connells battling Imhotep in an animated series. And Universal got Sommers to set aside his idea of making smaller movies by giving him another monster project to write and direct: Van Helsing, a big budget adventure film featuring Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, Jekyll and Hyde, and werewolves. That one was not as well-received as his Mummy movies.
But while The Mummy Returns isn’t as popular as The Mummy, it does have a lot of fans. Because if you like the first movie, chances are high that you’ll find something to enjoy about the sequel. As Fraser said, “It was more of the same. People wanted more, so we gave them more of the same. We gave them more is more. Lucky for us, they responded!”
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