2008’s The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is one of the great movies that doesn’t exist. That is to say that it’s a movie that technically exists (and actually performed well at the box office) but left such a minor impact on culture that it’s remarkably easy to forget it ever happened.
The fact that it was the third entry in an otherwise beloved series that abandoned nearly everything about its predecessors makes it that much more obscure. Brendan Fraser returned, but Rachel Weisz did not. Weisz was replaced with Maria Bello, who essentially plays an entirely different version of the same character. Behind the scenes, the movie lost director and screenwriter Stephen Sommers as well as a host of legacy crew members. What we were left with was a strange story involving the mythical origins of the Terracotta Army that made little use of the franchise’s highlights and even less use of potentially incredible newcomers Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh. It was just… bizarre.
Well, the good news is that we recently learned that a fourth Mummy movie is reportedly in development. While the details of that movie (including Rachel Weisz’s rumored return) haven’t been officially confirmed yet, Brendan Fraser has been talking around it quite a bit during a press tour for his new movie Rental Family. In an interview with the Associated Press, Fraser said it’s “time to give the fans what they want” and noted that “the [Mummy movie] I wanted to make is forthcoming.” Interestingly, he also offered some insight on why the third Mummy movie turned out the way it did.
“The third one was a model of … how can I say this to the AP reporter? NBC had the rights to broadcast the Olympics that year,” Fraser explains. “So they put two together and we went to China. Working in Shanghai, an incredible experience. I’m proud of the third one because I think it’s a good standalone movie. We picked up and did what we do with a different crew on deck and gave it our best shot.”
Fraser’s insight regarding the timing of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing does help put that movie’s somewhat cursed production in a new light. NBC and Universal Pictures (the studio behind the Fraser-led Mummy films) combined their assets in 2004. Not long after that, a script set for a third Mummy movie set in China started to make the rounds. Fraser is seemingly suggesting that NBCUniversal saw that idea as a tie-in to the much-anticipated Beijing Olympics that could play well in the Chinese film market and let that fringe benefits of that angle be the driving force behind the project.
For what it’s worth, the Tomb of the Dragon Emperor script quickly gained notoriety in the trades for being quite bad. Reportedly, an earlier version of that script included quite a bit of material that never made its way into the final film, including numerous callbacks to the first two movies. It’s possible that Weisz’s decision to leave the movie (which she later attributed to scheduling problems rather than her reported issues with the script) resulted in some of those changes. However, given that there were reportedly numerous alterations made to the script that took it quite far from its original form and into troubled production territory fairly early on (not to mention the quality of the film itself), the idea that NBCUniversal was committed to seeing the project through for other reasons starts to make sense.
The shame of it all is that Tomb of the Dragon Emperor really did have the potential to be something better. The aforementioned additions of Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh should have been great, and the decision to use the franchise as a vehicle for other mythologies had a lot of potential. Ultimately, though, it seems like the wheels fell off the movie pretty quickly and the studio dragged it across the finish line, partially due to corporate synergy and ulterior benefits. Here’s hoping that rumoured fourth film makes the third entry feel like even more of a blip.
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