Universal Pictures has gotten a hell of a lot of mileage out of The Mummy series over the years. The 1932 original film helped establish Boris Karloff as a major horror star and spawned five sequels, including 1955’s Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy. Then in 1999 the studio revived the property as a big-budget Raiders of the Lost Ark-style adventure with state-of-the-art visual effects and reaped huge rewards. The revitalized Mummy franchise made stars out of Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz and spawned two sequels of inferior quality, but still proved to be blockbusters for the studio, not to mention inspiring the Scorpion King spin-off series.

The last sequel, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, was released just four years ago, but now Universal is looking to reboot the franchise once again, and this time they’ve tapped Jon Spaihts to write the new movie.

Spaihts is best known for co-writing the forthcoming Prometheus, the summer sci-fi epic that marks Alien/Blade Runner director Ridley Scott’s first film in the genre in three decades, with Damon Lindelof. Sean Daniel, the producer on the 1999 Mummy and its two sequels, will serve as a producer on the new film as well. Spaihts’ unproduced sci-fi scripts, Passengers and Shadow 19, helped get him the job writing Prometheus. Keanu Reeves is currently producing Passengers.

There’s no word on what direction the re-rebooted Mummy will take this time, but Spaihts did drop a little hint in an interview with Variety:

Sounds like Spaihts is angling to a do a grand-scale horror film, which would be amazing to see if done right. But since Universal put the kibosh on Guillermo Del Toro’s expensive Lovecraft adaptation In the Mountains of Madness last year, the prospect of the studio backing a potentially costly feature without a guarantee that they can sell it to a mass audience is questionable. It would be a shame if the new Mummy was yet another sand-covered summer action movie. Then again, they could make it an atmospheric period piece, but look what happened to their recent Wolf Man remake.

[Source: Variety via /Film]