Barely a month after the release of "Total Recall," director Len Wiseman is getting ready for another movie. The director of the "Underworld" franchise is in talks with Universal Pictures to direct "The Mummy."
Alex Kutzman and Roberto Orci will produce the film under the K/O Paper Products banner. Jon Spaihts, who co-wrote Ridley Scott's "Prometheus" will be scripting the movie.
The "Mummy" saga of movies started with Karl Freund's "The Mummy" in the 1930s; it was remade in the 1990s starring Brendan Fraser. The last instalment of the franchise was released in 2008.
In an interview regarding a potential director for the project, Kurtzman told entertainment website Deadline, "['Underworld'] It was presented in this fresh, incredibly cool concept, but it never gave up its reverence for the mythology and that is what inspired us to meet with Len."
Wiseman has already worked with the producer's pilot episode "Hawaii Five-O" series. The duo is also working on another upcoming show, "Sleepy Hollow" for Fox.
Spaihts has made his intentions with "The Mummy" clear: "to go back to [this] franchise's roots in dark, scary source material," he said in April to entertainment website, Variety.
"When I first heard Universal was relaunching this, that is the image that popped into my head, the period tale, the old monster, but when Bob and Alex pitched it, there was a great new take and approach, and a very different mummy as well," he told Deadline. "It's a darker twist on the material, a scarier version."
The movie will lean more toward being a horror movie rather than just an "Indiana Jones" kind of movie.
"We're reaching into the deep roots of The Mummy, which at its beating heart is a horror movie and then an action movie, and putting it into a context that is real and emotional," Kurtzman said. "It's still a four-quadrant film but as a lot of recent movies have proven, audiences are hungry for more than they used to be. You can still have a family movie, an action movie that's more grounded than these used to be. Without saying too much, we've drawn a lot of inspiration from Michael Crichton's books, and how he ground fantastical tales in modern-day science."
Wiseman's version of "The Mummy" might see a summer 2014 release date.
