Lee Cronin’s The Mummy: Release Date, Cast, Trailers & More
Here's everything we know about the upcoming horror film from the director of Evil Dead Rise.
Director Lee Cronin burst onto the scene with 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, a reboot to the long-running Evil Dead franchise that left audiences squirming.
The film grossed $147 million and gave Cronin the opportunity to tackle future horror projects. In 2024, New Line Cinema announced plans for another Cronin horror feature, set for release in 2026. It wasn’t until December 2024 that it was revealed the movie would be a new take on the classic Mummy character. Cronin said at the time that, “This will be unlike any Mummy movie you ever laid eyeballs on before. I’m digging deep into the earth to raise something very ancient and very frightening.”
Who’s In It?
Jack Reynor is set to play a journalist named Charlie Cannon, with Laia Costa as his wife. Natalie Grace plays Charlie’s missing daughter Katie, with Shylo Molina and Billie Roy playing her siblings. The rest of the cast’s characters remain unknown, but they include May Calamawy and Verónica Falcón. Filming took place from March to June of last year.
Who’s Behind the New Film?
As mentioned (and noted in the title of the film itself), Evil Dead Rise director Lee Cronin is helming the film, from a script he wrote. He brings with him a number of collaborators who also worked on Evil Dead Rise, including cinematographer David Garbett, composer Stephen McKeon, and editor Bryan Shaw. Both Garbett and Shaw also worked on the TV series Ash vs. Evil Dead, and Shaw served as editor on the 2013 soft reboot Evil Dead.
What’s It About?
Unlike past iterations connected to Universal’s long-running horror character, this take tells an original story centering on a journalist whose young daughter disappears in the desert. Eight years pass before the little girl mysteriously resurfaces, but all is not well with Katie, and odds are it involves some type of mummification.
Is This Connected to Any Previous Versions?
The Mummy has been a Universal horror character going back to 1932, with the first iteration starring Boris Karloff. The franchise spawned six features, ending in 1955 with Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy.
No one has confirmed if the movie will have any connections to any of the previous iterations of the Mummy franchise, specifically the 1999 reboot series starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz, which saw two sequels and a spin-off movie. It is safe to assume, though, that Cronin’s venture is a standalone film.
That franchise concluded in 2008 with The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor and was recently announced to be getting a reboot of its own. Fraser and Weisz are set to reteam for a feature to be helmed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (known as Radio Silence, whose Ready or Not 2: Here I Come just hit theaters just last week) for a 2028 release. Not much is known about that movie aside from Fraser and Weisz reprising their roles as married adventurers Rick and Evie O’Connell.
It’s also unclear if this movie will have any reference to the Dark Universe reboot of the movie starring Tom Cruise and released in 2017, in which Cruise played a man trying to stop an evil Egyptian ruler (Sofia Boutella) brought back to life. That feature was meant to usher in a resurgence of gritty retreads of Universal’s iconic monsters, which already included 2014’s Dracula Untold. Future films would have included Russell Crowe as Dr. Henry Jekyll, Johnny Depp as the Invisible Man, and Javier Bardem as Frankenstein’s Monster, among other stories. The film’s box office failure and critical drubbing put an end to the Dark Universe, though Universal did ultimately release standalone films for The Invisible Man (starring Elisabeth Moss) in 2020 and Wolf Man (starring Christopher Abbott and Julia Garner) in 2025.
Notably, Blumhouse Productions, which is co-producing Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, has released most of its recent films — including The Invisible Man and Wolf Man — under Universal Pictures as part of a first-look distribution deal that began in 2014. However, Lee Cronin’s film is being produced under Warner Bros.’ New Line Cinema banner and will be distributed by WB, not Universal Pictures, which reinforces the idea even further that this will be a wholly original film not connected to the classic monster series.
Are There Any Trailers?
The first teaser dropped in January with the tagline “What happened to Katie.” A full trailer was released three weeks later.
When Will It Be Released?
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy will be in theaters on April 17, 2026.
