The Fall Guy recently attracted some attention for becoming the first non-superhero prospective blockbuster to open up the traditional summer movie season in nearly 20 years, since the 2006 release of Mission: Impossible III. Back then, the first-weekend-in-May tradition was only seven years old. The other six titles in the club at that time: Two superhero movies; two Ridley Scott movies; and two Mummy movies. The Mummy, in fact, invented the first-weekend-of-May start to the summer movie season, 25 years ago.
Technically, anyway. The season was clearly moving in that direction throughout the 1990s, inching up from Memorial Day weekend to earlier in the month. It would have gotten around to the first weekend in May with or without The Mummy, just as there probably would have been a Mummy remake with or without Stephen Sommers, who had at that point mainly directed some throwback Disney live-action pictures and one agreeably dopey monster flick called Deep Rising. But for some reason, this director making this movie and putting it out on this release date turned The Mummy into one of 1999’s biggest hits, well-liked enough to inspire an even-bigger sequel two years later.
It’s tempting, then, to look at The Mummy principally as a bit of box office trivia, not least because it felt, at the time, like the movie was getting a jump on summer-movie anticipation for the first new Star Wars movie in 16 years; as a former 18-year-old, I can say that an Indiana Jones knockoff did indeed feel like the correct appetizer for that particular meal. (It was basically a bigger-scale version of Stargate hitting it unexpectedly big ahead of Star Trek: Generations.) But I also saw The Mummy again in its recent anniversary rerelease, and was surprised to find that the movie also plays pretty well on its own – better, maybe, because competing with Star Wars, or Indiana Jones, or the best of the Universal Monster movies that inspired it, does The Mummy no particular favors.
What does do it a favor, however, is the original series of Mummy movies from Universal – not that much of the movie’s audience had likely checked those out 25 years ago. But as if anticipating the upgraded (and/or heretical) “fast” zombies of movies like 28 Days Later, Sommers engineered a bigger, faster, more muscular Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo), in sharp contrast to the shambling and stumbling version played by Boris Karloff or, especially, the successor played by Lon Chaney Jr. Karloff’s Mummy at least has an otherworldly creepiness; Chaney’s is serviceable, but not an intensely frightening or fascinating creature in the vein of Dracula, the Invisible Man, various Wolf Men, etc. Surprisingly, though, the ’99 Mummy plays more like a monster movie than suggested by its reputation as an adventure movie that dispenses with Imhotep’s rags as soon as possible. It’s true that he mostly doesn’t wear the traditional mummy wrappings, but he spends some time with half-rotted flesh before he takes on Vosloo’s gleaming, impressive physique. He’s a good mummy!
Of course, The Mummy is probably better-remembered for its pairing of 1999 Man of the Year Brendan Fraser (in between Hugh Wilson projects; classic Fraser!) and Rachel Weisz. (According to Twitter, Weisz in particular prompted countless bisexual awakenings.) Both performers eventually won Oscars… coincidence?! Look, I can’t pretend Rick O’Connell and Evelyn Carnahan are on par with Indy and Marion, but another way The Mummy connects to The Fall Guy beyond release dates and a lack of superheroes is that it depends as much on human chemistry as visual-effects combustion. No one would mistake it for a classic romance, but that this kind of swashbickering is in a monster movie at all keeps it fresh while connecting the movie, however tenuously, to the perverse-romance angles of some of the old Mummy films. Rick and Evie provide a mostly-whole counterpoint to Imhotep’s bitter refusal to let his murderous passion stay dead.
The Mummy seemed like it was awakening something beyond long-dead high priests and a widening summer-movie window, but this turned out not to be the case. Within a few years, Sommers had made a sequel and a sort of companion piece in the form of Van Helsing, wherein Hugh Jackman plays the character from Dracula as younger, sexier and more expansive in his monster-hunting. (Frankenstein’s Monster, Mr. Hyde, Dracula, and his brides all appear.) Sommers was obviously in his element, mashing monsters together with garishly demonstrable enthusiasm. The Dark Universe was his!
Alas, it slipped away, as Dark Universes do; Van Helsing made the classic move of earning money that would have made The Mummy a solid hit, but with elevated expectations (and budgets) that made it more of a costly disappointment. Spider-Man had already kicked off the superhero craze (Spider-Man 2 had to settle for the July 4th weekend in the Van Helsing summer of 2004), and Sommers didn’t make the belated and little-loved The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor as Rob Cohen saw the trilogy to its end. After that, not even Tom Cruise could get a new Mummy series going.
In fact, Sommers is the only filmmaker who’s really made a bona fide big-budget smash out of Universal Monsters material – for better or for worse. His Mummy stands as perhaps the ultimate example of movies that might have felt cheesy or hacky in 1999 managing to stand the test of time simply by maintaining a level of professionally silly, ineffable movie-ness that many of its spiritual successors couldn’t match. (It’s telling that his contemporary equivalent seems to be Leigh Whannell, who made a terrific Invisible Man and is now working on a Wolf Man redo, in part because his budgets are low-stakes enough that he’s allowed to make movies that look cinematic, rather than videogame-y.)
By all good sense, considering the many flat-out stunners 1999 would provide, it’s fairly ridiculous that The Mummy would be talked about with such affection so many years later – and as part of a bygone era, no less! The Mummy should have inspired so many Indy-knockoff imitators and splashy monster movies that we’d all be completely sick of them. Apparently Van Helsing was sick-making enough for a whole development slate. It, too, now feels almost quaint in its excesses. Sommers recreated a monster; the surprise was that it didn’t stick around longer.
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including GQ, Decider, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.