Len Wiseman. Lovely bloke (I've met him), husband to the gorgeous Kate Beckinsale but not exactly what you'd consider a top notch director, right? I feel bad saying that, because he was such a gent, and he must be doing something right to have gotten to where he is, but it's not every day you hear 'Ooh, a Len Wiseman movie, tell me more, I'm riveted'.
Well nobody gave a toss about the fact that he was brought on board to rejuvinate The Mummy franchise for Universal and turn it into something epic after Brendan Fraser's lukewarm series of films (while admittedly I enjoyed the first one - well, I was 11 when it came out - don't even get me started on the one in which his son is fully grown, just atrocious) but now it seems Mr Wiseman is off the books. Something about scheduling conflicts.
This comes as welcome news to those of you who envisage a Mummy movie as being something that, done right, could be a lot of fun and quite glorious on the big screen, be in IMAX or 3D or whatever other fancy technical add ons you can think of. Chances are they'd cast off the slapstick humour that Brendan Fraser brought to the mix and, as has become the norm, 'go darker'.
Prometheus scribe is still attached so with the right person at the helm, this could be quite the summer blockbuster come, say, 2015. Jon Spaihts says of The Mummy challenge that he sees it "as the sort of opportunity I had with Prometheus: to go back to a franchise’s roots in dark, scary source material, and simultaneously open it up to an epic scale we haven’t seen before."
Any suggestions for a director?
