‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’ Hits Rare 18+ Rating Overseas, Runs 134 Minures

Blumhouse has been tweeting reminders every day for well over a week now: Brendan Fraser is not in “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy.”

Somehow, this relentless social media campaign has generated more exposure for the film, which has been struggling in tracking, and is attempting to distance itself from the recently announced Fraser-starring ‘Mummy 4,’ set to hit theaters in 2028.

That said, Blumhouse probably should have kept the original test-screening title, “The Resurrection,” because, if anything, Cronin’s film is looking more and more like an ‘anti-Mummy’ statement — there’s gore, and lots of it. It’s so intense that censors overseas are already giving it strict ratings, including in Ireland, Canada, and Sourh Korea where it has garnered incredibly rare 18+ ratings. In the US, it received an “R,” because extreme violence is more accepted than sex and nudity — sorry, “Pillion.”

Cronin, who earned positive reviews for “Evil Dead Rise,” has apparently pushed the gore to extreme levels (which isn’t always a bad thing). One cited scene from a recent test screening, described by an attendee as “truly vile,” involved “a scorpion that crawls into somebody’s mouth and severs their vocal cords, leading someone to stick their fingers down that person’s throat and press on their cords, allowing them to speak.” Lovely.

Cronin did warn us. When the project was announced in 2024, he released a statement saying, “This will be unlike any Mummy movie you ever laid eyeballs on before. I’m digging deep into the earth to raise something very ancient and very frightening.”

Furthermore, the film is rather long, clocking in at 134 minutes, which means there’s a whole lot of movie in there. For fans expecting a traditional mummy adventure, this is not it — and that’s very much the point.

The film stars Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, May Calamawy, Natalie Grace, and Veronica Falcón. It’s slated to hit theaters on April 17.