TLDR: Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is a 2026 supernatural horror film written and directed by Lee Cronin, produced by James Wan and Jason Blum through Atomic Monster and Blumhouse Productions, and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. It stars Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, May Calamawy, Natalie Grace, and Verónica Falcón. The film follows an American family in Albuquerque who are reunited with their daughter eight years after she vanished in Egypt — only to realise something ancient and demonic came back with her. Made on a $22 million budget, it grossed $71 million worldwide. It holds 47% on Rotten Tomatoes but a 75% audience score and performed well enough on digital to confirm the franchise has a future. It is not the Mummy movie you expect. It is something more unsettling than that — and more divisive.
There is a very specific kind of courage it takes to make a movie called The Mummy and then spend almost none of it on mummies.
Lee Cronin did exactly that. And depending on which kind of horror fan you are, that decision is either the most interesting thing about this film — or the most frustrating.
I land somewhere in the middle. This is a film with genuine atmosphere, a director who clearly knows how to unsettle an audience, and a central performance by Natalie Grace that is worth the price of admission on its own. It is also a film that runs 134 minutes, leans heavily on gross-out body horror, and leaves you wondering what a tighter, more focused version of it could have been.
But let me start at the beginning. Because the beginning is where this film is strongest.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy — Movie Details
| Detail | Info |
|---|---|
| Title | Lee Cronin’s The Mummy |
| US Release | April 17, 2026 |
| US Premiere | April 9, 2026 (American Legion Post 43, Los Angeles) |
| Director | Lee Cronin |
| Written by | Lee Cronin |
| Produced by | James Wan, Jason Blum, John Keville |
| Production | New Line Cinema, Atomic Monster, Blumhouse Productions, Wicked/Good |
| Distributor | Warner Bros. Pictures |
| Cinematography | Dave Garbett |
| Music | Stephen McKeon |
| Editor | Bryan Shaw |
| Runtime | 134 minutes |
| Rating | R |
| Budget | $22 million |
| Box Office | $71 million worldwide |
| Digital Release | May 19, 2026 |
| Physical Release | July 14, 2026 (4K, Blu-ray, DVD) |
| Filming Locations | Ireland and Spain |
What Is Lee Cronin’s The Mummy About?
The film opens in Aswan, Egypt. A family returns home to find their pet bird dead. The father, Gamal, investigates a sealed sarcophagus hidden beneath the house. When the lid is pried loose, a jagged hook catches his jaw and kills him instantly.
Something has been let out.
In Cairo, journalist Charlie Cannon — played by Jack Reynor — is covering stories with his pregnant wife Larissa, played by Laia Costa. Their daughter Katie wanders off to meet a girl named Layla, the daughter of the woman who opened the sarcophagus. A nectarine is offered. Then Katie vanishes. Gone without a trace into the Egyptian desert.
Eight years later, the Cannon family has relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico. They live in a big old house owned by Larissa’s mother Carmen, played by Verónica Falcón. Katie’s room has been kept exactly as she left it. They never stopped hoping.
Then the call comes. Cairo detective Dalia, played by May Calamawy, has found Katie. She is alive.
She comes home. She is pale, quiet, barely eating. The family tells themselves she just needs time. But the things that start happening inside the house cannot be explained by trauma or grief. The wrappings on Katie’s body — inscribed with ancient binding spells — have been removed during the journey home. And what those wrappings were holding inside her is now looking for a way out.
This is where the film earns its horror credentials. The house sequences — the sounds from rooms no one is in, the wrong angle of a limb, the moment you realise Katie is not entirely herself — are genuinely frightening. Cronin knows how to build dread through restraint before he pulls the curtain back.
The problem is what is behind the curtain.
Full Cast Breakdown
| Actor | Character |
|---|---|
| Jack Reynor | Charlie Cannon — an American TV news correspondent based in Cairo |
| Laia Costa | Larissa — Charlie’s wife, a nurse |
| May Calamawy | Dalia — a Cairo detective investigating the disappearance |
| Natalie Grace | Katie Cannon — Charlie’s daughter, returned after eight years |
| Verónica Falcón | Carmen — Larissa’s mother, owner of the Albuquerque house |
| Shylo Molina | Teenage Seb — Charlie and Larissa’s son |
| Billie Roy | Maud — Charlie and Larissa’s younger daughter |
| Hayat Kamille | The Magician — the woman who opened the sarcophagus |
| May Elghety | Supporting role — one of Cronin’s favorite cast additions |
| Lily Sullivan | Teacher (cameo) — the lead of Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise, appearing by personal request |
That Lily Sullivan cameo is worth noting. Sullivan played Ellie in Evil Dead Rise and personally asked Cronin to include her in this film. He was happy to do it. If you are a fan of Evil Dead Rise, keep your eyes open during the school scenes.
May Calamawy and May Elghety are the only Egyptian actors in the cast — a deliberate casting decision Cronin has spoken about with pride. Calamawy, who is Egyptian-Palestinian, had to work on her Egyptian Arabic dialect for the role. Elghety grew up in Egypt and helped the production get the colloquial language right. Cronin has said the scenes between the two of them are some of his personal favourites in the film.
Lee Cronin — The Man Behind Evil Dead Rise
If you saw Evil Dead Rise in 2023, you already know what Lee Cronin brings to horror.
He is an Irish filmmaker who started with the 2019 slow-burn horror film The Hole in the Ground and moved to Evil Dead Rise — the sequel-to-a-remake that became one of the most viscerally punishing mainstream horror films in recent memory. He is comfortable with body horror, practical effects, confined spaces, and the particular terror of watching a family member become something you cannot reach.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is, in many ways, the same film taken to a bigger canvas and a longer runtime. The body horror is more elaborate. The set pieces are more ambitious. The family dynamics are more developed. And the commitment to practical disgust — cracking bones, skin peeling, teeth, the pedicure scene that critics kept mentioning — is relentless.
Cronin has said one of his proudest achievements with this film is its authentic Egyptian cast and its use of the Arabic language throughout. The early Egypt sequences feel genuinely grounded and specific, which makes the horror that comes from them feel more real than if the film had treated Egypt as generic exotic backdrop.
He also made a decision that is genuinely bold for a studio horror film: he did not make a mummy movie. He made a demonic possession film that happens to use ancient Egyptian mythology as its engine. The Mummy of the title refers less to the bandaged creature of Universal Monsters lore and more to the wrapped, bound vessel that Katie has become — a prison for something that predates her by thousands of years.
The Blumhouse and Atomic Monster Connection
The combination of James Wan’s Atomic Monster and Jason Blum’s Blumhouse Productions is one of the most reliable partnerships in modern horror.
Atomic Monster is behind the Conjuring universe and a string of successful supernatural horror films. Blumhouse invented the model of making horror inexpensively and profitably — from Paranormal Activity to Get Out to The Invisible Man. Together, they greenlit this project through New Line Cinema at $22 million, which is a remarkably lean budget for a wide Warner Bros. release.
The comparison to The Invisible Man (2020) is the benchmark everyone keeps reaching for. That film cost $7 million and grossed $144 million worldwide. The Wolf Man (2025) — the more recent Universal Monsters reimagining — cost $25 million and made $34 million total, which was a genuine disappointment.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy landed in between. $71 million worldwide on a $22 million budget is a comfortable profit, particularly once digital and physical home release revenue is factored in. The film immediately became one of the most-purchased titles on digital the week it dropped on May 19, which tells you the audience it did not reach theatrically found it another way.
What Critics Said
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy holds 47% on Rotten Tomatoes from 187 critics’ reviews, with the consensus reading that it injects some juicy gore and personal stakes into the classic horror setup but gets entombed by a padded running time.
The most negative critical responses focused on the film’s identity problem — or what Rotten Tomatoes’ critics saw as its lack of one. The Film Verdict called it more exorcism saga than mummy picture, an endless parade of gross-outs that begs to be locked in a sarcophagus. The review argued the film never engages with human consciousness in the way that genuine horror should, instead relying on witless bad taste and simple-minded shock effects. That is a tough verdict, but an honest one if you found the film’s third act too relentless.
IndieWire criticised the muted jolts and drab setups between horror sequences. Deadline said it is not very scary in any conventional sense. The Times UK praised Cronin as a gifted stylist even while finding the content thin.
The positive critical responses — and there are enough of them to take seriously — praised the atmosphere, the performances, and Cronin’s visual confidence. AV Club noted the film’s throbbing score gets under your skin in exactly the right way. HeyUGuys praised Stephen McKeon’s music for tightening the atmosphere in the quieter stretches rather than filling them. Variety called it lavishly gory with impressive visual direction.
SlashFilm’s Chris Evangelista described it as a surprisingly stylish and gory freakshow, noting that it is not really a mummy movie but feels more like an Exorcist film — and that this is a creative choice rather than a failure.
The audience score of 75% on Rotten Tomatoes, alongside a B from CinemaScore, tells a different story to the critics. Horror fans who came specifically for Cronin’s brand of committed body horror found what they were looking for. General audiences expecting adventure-horror in the Brendan Fraser vein were understandably confused.
You can read the full critical and audience breakdown at Rotten Tomatoes.
The “Poltergeist Meets Seven” Description
Before the film released, the first poster and images were accompanied by a description that has stuck in the discourse around this film: it was called a combination of Poltergeist and Seven.
That description is more accurate than it might seem at first.
Poltergeist because the film is fundamentally about a family whose home becomes a site of supernatural attack, with a child at the centre of it who has been taken and returned in a form that is no longer entirely safe.
Seven because of the procedural element that May Calamawy’s detective brings to the film, and because of the moral and philosophical weight the film wants to carry about what is inside the vessel and what it costs to contain it.
Neither of those films is a mummy movie either. And if you approach Lee Cronin’s The Mummy through that lens rather than through the lens of what you expect from The Mummy as a franchise, the film makes significantly more sense.
Authentic Egyptian Representation
Something that has not been discussed enough in the mainstream coverage of this film is how seriously Cronin took the cultural authenticity of the Egyptian sequences.
The film was written with an intentional commitment to casting Egyptian actors in Egyptian roles. May Calamawy — known internationally from Moon Knight — and May Elghety were the only Egyptian actors in the main cast, and both brought something to the production that went beyond performance. Elghety specifically helped ensure the colloquial Arabic language in the Egypt scenes was accurate and specific rather than generic.
Cronin has spoken about this in interviews as something he is genuinely proud of — not as a box to tick but as a creative choice that makes the horror feel grounded in something real. The opening Aswan sequences are among the most atmospheric in the film precisely because they feel like a specific place rather than a horror movie set.
What Works
The atmosphere in the film’s first half is exceptional. The Egypt opening is genuinely unsettling. The arrival of Katie back into the family home — quiet, pale, wrong in ways you cannot quite articulate — is handled with real skill. Cronin understands that the best horror happens in the space between what you see and what you feel.
Natalie Grace as Katie is the film’s most committed performance. She is asked to do things that are physically and emotionally extreme, and she delivers them without flinching. The sequences where the thing inside her is trying to get out — without being obviously supernatural enough for the family to believe — are the film’s best.
The score by Stephen McKeon deserves specific praise. Horror music often announces itself. McKeon’s work here is present without being loud, tightening the atmosphere in the quieter scenes in a way that keeps you on edge without you quite realising it is happening.
May Calamawy brings genuine weight to every scene she is in. Her detective is the most fully written character in the film outside of the family itself, and the scenes between her and Elghety are — as Cronin promised — some of the most interesting in the film.
The decision to make this a demonic possession story rather than a conventional mummy film is a genuinely brave creative choice, even if the execution does not fully justify the ambition.
What Does Not Quite Work
The runtime is the most honest problem with the film. 134 minutes is too long for what Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is doing. The horror sequences are effective in isolation but exhausting as a sustained barrage. By the time the third act arrives, the film has spent so much energy on visceral shock that it has depleted the audience’s tolerance for more of it.
Jack Reynor is asked to spend most of the film in a state of wide-eyed alarm, and the performance — through no clear fault of his own — becomes monotonous. The Film Verdict noted he was directed to blink as little as possible, which is striking for about ten minutes and then becomes something you notice rather than feel.
The film is more interested in what it can put on screen than why any of it matters emotionally. The family dynamics are established efficiently but never built on. The moment of potential thematic depth — that trapping a demon inside a human body is itself an act of horror, and that this burden has been passed down through generations — is introduced and then abandoned before the script does anything serious with it.
This is the version of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy that frustrates. Not because it is badly made, but because you can see a better version of it very clearly from inside the one you are watching.
The Box Office Story — A Win, Not a Triumph
The film opened to $13.5 million domestically in its first weekend, ranking third behind The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and Project Hail Mary. That opening is roughly comparable to where predictions put it — not a breakout, but not a disaster.
The more impressive number is the international performance: $20.9 million from 78 markets in its opening weekend alone, giving it a $34 million global start against a $22 million budget. By the time the theatrical run concluded, the film had reached $71 million worldwide — a genuine profit by any studio accounting.
The sophomore weekend drop of 59% was actually better than expected for a horror film in this position, and Screen Rant noted it broke a specific streak of underperforming horror releases that had plagued 2026 up to that point. The comparison point everyone reached for was Wolf Man — which opened to $10.9 million and then collapsed. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy held better.
The digital performance has been strong since May 19. The theatrical audience it did not reach found it on digital, and reviews from that audience have been broadly positive — the film works better, it seems, at home and at night than it did in the context of a crowded spring release weekend against family films.
For horror fans looking for something with a similar dark energy, our coverage of Send Help (2026) — Sam Raimi’s survival horror thriller — is worth a read. And if you enjoy Blumhouse’s approach to modern horror, check out everything new in our Hollywood section at HDMovies4U.
Where to Watch
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is now available on digital purchase from all major platforms as of May 19, 2026. Physical media — 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and DVD — releases on July 14, 2026.
My Final Verdict
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is a film that is more interesting to think about than it is to sit through.
The first act is atmospheric and specific in the best ways. Natalie Grace is genuinely terrifying. Cronin’s commitment to practical horror and authentic Egyptian representation are both admirable creative choices. The score is one of the best things about the film.
The third act is too long, too relentless, and too uninterested in the emotional consequences of everything it has been building. The demonic possession pivot that some critics resented is actually the right instinct — the execution just does not always keep up with the ambition.
If you loved Evil Dead Rise and you want Cronin doing something on a bigger canvas with ancient Egyptian mythology as the engine, there is enough here to justify the watch. If you came for adventure-horror in the spirit of the Brendan Fraser era, this will disappoint you — and that disappointment is the film’s fault for wearing The Mummy name without fully committing to what that name means to audiences.
My rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars. A stylish, committed, sometimes genuinely frightening horror film that runs about 30 minutes too long and leaves you wanting the better version of it that is clearly somewhere inside the one you just watched.
Check the full cast and crew on the IMDB page for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (2026).
