As the new calendar year of 2023 kicks in, the Academy Award season is now in full swing as many of the major Oscar contenders make their push to win big in the coming months. One of these is The Whale, a film starring Brendan Fraser, who is perhaps best known for his role in The Mummy trilogy of the late 1990s and 2000s.
Once a household name, Brendan Fraser went largely out of the spotlight in the past decade or more. The Canadian-American actor has described depression, health issues, and more as reasons for stepping away, although he has always remained somewhat active in film and television even as his projects aren’t necessarily as high profile as they used to be. The Whale is truly his comeback, though, such is the strength of his performance and the film overall. His old franchise, The Mummy, has not had the same sort of success, with Tom Cruise’s Dark Universe proving to be dead upon arrival. As Fraser is still so closely associated with The Mummy, a series that had its most popular moments in recent memory with him at the helm, it’s possible that his return to the limelight could see come back to the iconic horror-adventure franchise.
The re-emergence of Brendan Fraser and the renaissance of his career is likely to lead to an Academy Award win for Best Actor. Fraser has already picked up countless prizes this season for his performance in The Whale, and is heavily favored to win the ultimate coveted award at the next Oscar ceremony in March. For this role, Fraser transformed physically, wearing a heavy prosthetic suit to help him look the part of a 600-pound morbidly obese man who is dying and in his final days. The story of this film is an interesting one, with the uniqueness of Charlie’s (Fraser) life and his predicament as an immobile and physically disabled person. Ultimately, it’s Fraser that brings an incredible amount of emotion and depth to this character and the film more broadly, highlighting his strength as an actor and a performer.
As Fraser surges, his old Mummy franchise is in limbo. In 2017, Tom Cruise starred in a reboot of the series in a film that attempted to set up the Dark Universe, as it was labeled, which was set to include other classic Universal movie monsters like Frankenstein, Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, the Invisible Man, and Dracula. Johnny Depp, Javier Bardem, Russell Crowe, and Sofia Boutella were all recruited as major characters in this world, and all were planned to have their own solo films to lead. That never came to fruition, and the universe stalled immediately as The Mummy received extremely poor reviews, with a 15% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics and fans alike criticized its similarities to another Cruise franchise, Mission Impossible. Rather than a Mummy film, it felt more like another globe-trotting adventure with Ethan Hunt and the rest of the crew from those films.
Brendan Fraser’s Mummy trilogy was much better received, however. The first film, which was released in May of 1999, received a 61% score on Rotten Tomatoes as well as a 75% audience score on the site. Critics and audiences were clearly more interested and impressed with this iteration than the newer reboot, especially as Fraser’s films blended an Indiana Jones style of adventure with the classic monster tropes that are always so closely associated with the character. The latter two films in the trilogy weren’t received quite as well, with a 47% and 13% respectively, but Fraser’s presence (especially in the second) was enough to keep audiences interested and invested in the story and these characters.
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Now, Universal has an opportunity to reintroduce Brendan Fraser into the franchise and reignite their Dark Universe. In this new era of Hollywood where film studios are so eager to make a cinematic universe of their own, it’s easy to forget that the Universal movie monsters of the 20th century was actually the first shared universe. The history is there for these iconic characters to come together, and the studio was arguably on the right track in 2017 with their ambitious plans.
Now that Brendan Fraser is back in the spotlight, though, he could easily come back into the fray and make audiences interested in these movies once again. His presence would automatically guarantee a degree of intrigue in the universe, especially if he becomes an Academy Award winner in the next few months. His Mummy films are also very nostalgic for audiences, something that Marvel, DC, and Star Wars all like to play on to keep viewers invested, so Universal could take some advice from those franchises to help grow this franchise once again. Their last attempt was unsuccessful, but perhaps Fraser is what they were missing.