The Mummy Just Proved Blumhouse Can Resurrect Anything — But Should They?

4 days ago by Riley Vox 5 min read

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Lee Cronin's The Mummy is sitting at 58% on Rotten Tomatoes — miles ahead of the 2017 Dark Universe disaster but nowhere near his own Evil Dead Rise. It's bloody, it's loud, and it can't decide what kind of movie it wants to be.

The Mummy is sitting at 58% on Rotten Tomatoes, and honestly? That number tells you everything you need to know about this movie.

It's not bad enough to be a disaster. It's not good enough to be a triumph. It's a 133-minute horror film that can't figure out if it wants to be Evil Dead Rise, The Exorcist, or The Thing — so it tries to be all three. And that's exactly the problem.

The Blumhouse Bet

Look, we need to talk about the elephant in the sarcophagus.

In 2017, Universal tried to launch the "Dark Universe" with a Tom Cruise Mummy that cost north of $125 million, scored 15% on Rotten Tomatoes, and killed an entire cinematic universe before it took its first breath. That movie wanted to be a Marvel-style franchise launcher. It was a $125 million corporate memo with a mummy stapled to it.

So when Blumhouse and New Line picked up the franchise with Lee Cronin — the guy who turned Evil Dead Rise into an 89% RT hit on a shoestring budget — it felt like the smartest play in horror. Low budget. High concept. A director who proved he could make a franchise breathe again.

So what happened?

What Works (And It Does Work, Sometimes)

Here's the thing — if you're a gorehound, The Mummy delivers. And I mean delivers.

The body horror is extreme, relentless, and occasionally genuinely creative. Lee Cronin knows how to make skin crawl. The premise — a daughter disappears into the desert and returns eight years later, transformed into something that isn't quite human anymore — has real emotional potential. Jack Reynor carries the father role with enough weight to make you care. Laia Costa and May Calamawy round out a cast that's doing their best with what they're given.

The Hollywood Reporter called it "enough style and scares, breathless energy and fiendish humor." The Irish Times went further: "A blast for those who like horror propulsive, transgressive and nauseating."

If you walked out of Barbarian or The Conjuring wanting something meaner and messier? This is your movie.

What Doesn't Work (And Here's Where It Falls Apart)

133 minutes. One hundred and thirty-three minutes. For a horror movie.

I need to say that again because apparently nobody in the editing room thought it was a problem. Evil Dead Rise was 97 minutes of pure lean horror. The Mummy is 36 minutes longer and every single one of those extra minutes shows.

Variety nailed it: there's "no earthly reason" for this runtime. The jump scares pile up until they become exhausting. The characters are paper-thin — you're watching people you barely know get terrorized for over two hours and at some point the diminishing returns become impossible to ignore.

IndieWire went even harder: "Dull and labored," "too derivative," with a "titular evil never less threatening." That last one stings. When your mummy is the least scary thing in a Mummy movie, you've got a structural problem.

Deadline put it best: Cronin "grabbed a bunch of different clothes off a rack." The movie borrows from Evil Dead Rise. It borrows from The Exorcist. It borrows from The Thing. But it never finds its own voice.

The Cronin Problem

This is the part that bugs me the most.

Evil Dead Rise worked because it understood restraint. Apartment building. Small cast. 97 minutes. Every scare earned. It was a masterclass in doing more with less.

The Mummy is what happens when someone gives that same director more — more budget, more runtime, more franchise expectations — and the result is somehow less. Lee Cronin's visual flair is still there. His instinct for body horror hasn't dulled. But the movie around those instincts is bloated and derivative in a way Evil Dead Rise never was.

More isn't more. It never has been. Horror directors know this.

Is This Better Than 2017?

Yes. Obviously. But that is the lowest bar in franchise history. The 2017 Mummy is a 15% cultural punchline. Saying The Mummy 2026 is better than that is like saying getting a paper cut is better than getting hit by a bus. Technically accurate. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

The real question: is it better than the 1999 Brendan Fraser Mummy? Different genre entirely — that was an adventure film with horror seasoning, this is a horror film with no seasoning at all — but no. Not even close. The '99 Mummy had charm, characters you wanted to spend time with, and a sense of fun. This one has intestines.

And honestly? If we're going back even further, the 1932 original with Boris Karloff still has more atmosphere in its first ten minutes than this entire film.

The Verdict

The Mummy is tracking for a $15-20 million opening weekend. That's fine for a Blumhouse budget. It'll turn a profit. The franchise will continue.

And that's the thing about Blumhouse, isn't it? They've built an empire on the understanding that horror doesn't need to be expensive to be profitable. Insidious. The Conjuring. Get Out. They've proven the model works.

But "profitable" and "good" aren't the same thing. The Mummy proves Blumhouse can resurrect anything. The question is whether they should.

A 58% on Rotten Tomatoes isn't a failure. It's something worse. It's a shrug.

I said what I said.