Opening Weekend Forecast: £500,000-800,000
Theatrical Total Forecast: £2M – £2.5M
U.K.-based cinema advertising company Pearl & Dean has released their predicted opening range for Warner Bros. monster flick Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, opening in the U.K./Ireland market this weekend.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy undoubtedly has strong horror chops. A remake featuring one of cinema’s most iconic classic monsters, its titular director was responsible for the horror legacy sequel Evil Dead Rise, which grossed £5.5 million in the U.K. and Ireland. Joining Cronin are horror megaproducers James Wan, who brought us The Conjuring, Insidious, and Saw franchises under his Atomic Monster label, and Jason Blum’s Blumhouse Studios, distributor of Get Out (£10.5 million) and monster reimagining The Invisible Man (£6.9 million), just to name a few.
Trailers for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy lean hard into body horror, with squeamish imagery and bone cracking sound effects galore, hopefully mobilizing the horror crowd to get out to the cinema. Warner Bros.’ marketing depicts the film as a horror/mystery, a positioning that worked extremely well for the studio’s recent smash hit Weapons, which opened to £2.8M en route to a total £11.9M cume. Whether this framing will prove effective for The Mummy remains to be seen.
Unfortunately, classic horror re-imaginings have been hit-and-miss lately. Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu hit last year with £13M, as did the aforementioned The Invisible Man, released in 2020. On the other hand, Blumhouse’s recent creature feature Wolf Man underperformed, earning just £1.2 million in the U.K./Ireland market. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy also faces the specter of Stephen Sommers’ 1999 release The Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. Arguably the definitive Mummy iteration for modern audiences, the film is getting a new sequel in May 2028, potentially rendering Lee Cronin’s The Mummy less a hard-edged new beginning for the monster than a placeholder on the road to a story audiences are craving far more. All this combined with what feels like a low-effort ground campaign in terms of marketing suggests Warner Bros. may be looking to get the film over and done with.
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