Forget Action-Adventure — Lee Cronin’s The Mummy Is Here to Terrify You

The sand has been swept away. The adventure is buried. What’s left is pure, skin-crawling horror — and honestly, that might be exactly what The Mummy franchise needed all along.

Warner Bros. just dropped the official trailer for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, and it’s unlike anything that’s carried this title before. No swashbuckling archaeology. No Boris Karloff bandages. No Tom Cruise stunts. What you get instead is a deeply unsettling family horror mystery that asks one question above all: What happened to Katie?

What the Trailer Reveals

The first trailer shows a present-day story revolving around a family tragedy instead of an archaeology expedition. It starts with the disappearance of a journalist’s daughter in the desert. The loss shatters the family, and answers don’t come for eight years.

When Katie finally returns, the family’s joy quickly turns to horror. The trailer shows glimpses of the little girl as a mummified husk, with disturbing bodily contortions — and a devastating voiceover asking, “What was our daughter doing in a 3,000-year-old sarcophagus?” ScreenRant We’re also told there were 57 other connected abductions, which hints at a much larger mythology lurking beneath the surface.

The Mummy Film Facts

How It Differs from Previous Mummy Films

It has been nine years since a version of The Mummy hit the big screen, following the failed 2017 adaptation starring Tom Cruise, which essentially killed the planned Dark Universe of films. Cronin’s version operates completely independently of Universal’s established lore, giving the filmmaker total creative freedom to reinvent the mythos from scratch.

Cronin described the tonal blend: “It’s an insane mashup to suggest, but this film is almost one part Poltergeist and one part Seven, but put through my lens.” ScreenRant He also noted the domestic warmth of Poltergeist and the dark investigative angle of Se7en as key influences — a fascinating combination that positions this squarely as a puzzle-box horror film rather than a monster blockbuster.

Notably, this is also the first Mummy film in which the “mummy” itself is a child — breaking a long-standing trend where the antagonist was always a grown adult. IMDb

For more upcoming horror film breakdowns and trailers, check out our most anticipated horror movies of 2026 on TechnoSports and our complete guide to Warner Bros. releases this year for everything coming to theaters.

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