While you wait two years for The Mummy 4, Universal figures it can hold you over until then with a re-release of The Mummy Returns.
To celebrate its 25th birthday in May, the sequel is returning to theaters starting March 27 and running through at least the end of the month. Tickets are already on sale, and anyone hoping for some kind of special features like a video featuring the present day stars may be out of luck, as it seems that Universal’s just treating this like a standard screening. But then again, you get to see Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz on the big screen again, and isn’t that its own bonus? And a good salve for the Scorpion King’s 2001-era CG?
Like the first movie, The Mummy Returns was a hit with audience despite its mixed critical reception. At $435 million worldwide, it stands as the highest-grossing entry of the initial Stephen Sommers trilogy, and marked the Hollywood debut of Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson. Despite his aforementioned iffy CG, the studio decided to spin off Johnson’s future villain Mathayus of Akkad into his own movie, which came out the following year. That also made good money for its time, spawning its own series of films with several actors playing Mathayus in the sequels after Johnson departed.
Returns might also be the first of the Sommers Mummy movies to get re-released, and if that’s the case, it’s fitting since we know Fraser and Weisz are set to come back as older versions of Rick and Evelyn O’Connell. That, and the fun of these movies will be a good counter to the more depraved, potentially squeamish fun that’s in Lee Cronin’s The Mummy when that hits theaters on April 17.
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