Lee Cronin’s ‘The Mummy’ Originally Had a Much Darker Ending
Lee Cronin‘s wild take on The Mummy is now playing in theaters and scaring up good numbers at the box office. It’s a film riddled with Cronin’s penchant for mean, vicious horror, one that is entirely unafraid to go for the jugular. “Dark” is already a word I’d use to describe the film, but it turns out, it was originally much darker.
SPOILERS AHEAD!
While speaking with THR, Cronin was asked about the ending, in which Jack Reynor‘s character sacrifices himself to save his daughter by taking the demon possessing her into his own body. Later, we watch as his wife (Laia Costa) and a detective (Lay Calamawy) bring Reynor’s body to the woman who kidnapped the young girl in the first place. Well-deserved comeuppance…and a moment that wasn’t in the film initially.
“At one point, we ended the movie earlier,” said Cronin. “We ended it more around Charlie’s sacrifice, which was really important to me, but it was leaving the audience feeling a little bit incomplete. I really care about the audience having a thrill ride, but also having some semblance of relief or celebration.“
Continued the filmmaker, “I then realized, ‘You know what? We’ve put these characters through a lot. We punish them and drag them into all these different dark places. We’ve got to let them off the hook a little bit at the end. We can’t leave them arrested in these moments.’ So we felt then we had to push past the power of Charlie’s sacrifice, and also — even if it’s internal — give the audience something of a reason to cheer.”
In retrospect, that was probably the wise decision. Having seen the film, you certainly feel a sense of gloomy disappointment when Charlie sacrifices himself. We love a happy ending, and the final film’s conclusion offers a much more satisfying finish.
In The Mummy, a journalist’s young daughter disappears into the desert without a trace. Eight years later, the broken family is shocked when she is returned to them, as what should be a joyful reunion turns into a living nightmare.
In his review of The Mummy, Dread’s Josh Korngut wrote, “The film attempts to build an emotional spine strong enough to make its brutality really string, and not just shock, by centering the ghoulish story on a young girl and her grieving, all-American nuclear family. But that never lands. While the same gonzo nastiness that worked so well in Evil Dead bleeds through, that violence registers as simply gross rather than actually painful without any characters to actually care about.”
See The Mummy now in theaters via Warner Bros.
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