Lee Cronin’s The Mummy Review: All Gore, No Curse

Important context: as of now, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy has been announced, but it has not been released. That means many of the detailed plot points circulating online are unverified, and presenting them as established fact would be misleading. What is confirmed is that Lee Cronin—best known for Evil Dead Rise and The Hole in the Ground—is attached to write and direct a new Mummy film for New Line Cinema, with the project positioned as a new interpretation of the classic monster.

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That distinction matters, because the idea of a new Mummy movie immediately triggers a flood of expectations. For some viewers, The Mummy means the moody supernatural menace of the 1932 Boris Karloff classic. For others, it means the swashbuckling, monster-adventure fun of the Brendan Fraser films. And for modern horror fans, Cronin’s involvement suggests something nastier, more intimate, and more willing to get under the skin.

If that combination sounds exciting, it is because Cronin has already shown he knows how to weaponize confined spaces, family tension, and grotesque physical horror. Evil Dead Rise worked not just because it was bloody, but because it understood how to turn domestic anxiety into something demonic and overwhelming. That sensibility could make for a compelling horror movie.

But the real question is whether it makes for a compelling Mummy movie.

The Mummy is one of horror’s most difficult legacy monsters to modernize. Dracula and Frankenstein are endlessly adaptable because their core ideas are broad and durable: seduction, immortality, science gone wrong, alienation, hubris. The Mummy, by contrast, is tied to a much more specific iconography—tombs, curses, archaeology, burial rites, ancient Egypt, and the eerie feeling of history refusing to stay dead. Strip too much of that away, and you may still have a functional horror film, but not one that truly feels like The Mummy.

The danger for Cronin’s version is clear: if it leans too heavily into modern possession formulas, body-horror shocks, and haunted-house mechanics, it could end up resembling a generic supernatural thriller wearing Mummy branding.

That concern is not unfounded. In recent years, mainstream horror has often defaulted to the same visual and structural vocabulary: disturbed families, ominous children, cursed homes, contorted bodies, whispered incantations, and escalating scenes of demonic chaos. Cronin is talented enough to execute those beats with style, but style alone will not be enough here. A successful Mummy reboot needs more than disgust and dread. It needs mythic atmosphere.

What fans really want from this property is not simply another evil presence. They want the sensation of excavating something ancient and forbidden. They want desert mysticism, suffocating tomb imagery, cursed relics, crumbling history, and the unnerving suggestion that modern life is helpless before forces buried for thousands of years. In other words, they want a movie with an identity distinct from the last dozen exorcism and possession stories.

That is why Cronin’s involvement is both promising and slightly worrying. On one hand, he has the energy to make this version feel visceral, contemporary, and unapologetically mean. On the other, his strengths naturally pull toward flesh, panic, claustrophobia, and familial trauma—elements that may overshadow the grander, more uncanny dimensions that define the monster.

There is also the long shadow of previous adaptations. The 2017 Tom Cruise-led The Mummy famously tried to launch a larger franchise and collapsed under the weight of its own universe-building. That failure should have been a lesson: audiences do not come to The Mummy for corporate mythology or interchangeable spectacle. They come for a monster with a specific flavor—romantic, cursed, ancient, and uncanny. If Cronin can preserve that while still bringing his own harsher horror sensibility, the project could become one of the more interesting franchise revivals in years.

If not, it risks becoming another case of a recognizable title being used to sell a movie that could just as easily have been called something else.

For now, the fairest verdict is one of cautious skepticism. Cronin is a strong horror filmmaker with genuine visual confidence, and that alone makes this a project worth watching. But until the film arrives, any full plot-based review would be premature. What can be said is that the concept faces a creative challenge many reboots never solve: how to modernize a classic without sanding off the very qualities that made it worth resurrecting.

In the best-case scenario, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy becomes a truly unsettling fusion of ancient curse horror and modern body-horror intensity. In the worst-case scenario, it delivers plenty of gore but forgets the tomb, the mythology, and the sense of dread that should come with opening it.

And for a monster this iconic, all gore and no curse would be the biggest disappointment of all.

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Spoiler-Free Verdict: Based on what is currently confirmed, this is less a review of a finished movie than a reality check on a high-profile horror reboot. Lee Cronin has the talent to make The Mummy brutal and memorable, but the film’s success will depend on whether it embraces the monster’s ancient identity instead of reducing it to another possession nightmare.