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Straight from the Total Recall remake, director Len Wiseman will make his next paycheck directing the reboot of Universal's The Mummy.

Back when this one was first announced, my first thought was "Why?" After all, it had been less than 15 years since the release of the modern reboot of The Mummy, which at that time was directed by Stephen Sommers. Two sequels followed, with the second one proving to be more profitable than the third.

Deadline got a break and uncovered more of the answer to that why question by speaking directly with producer Alex Kurtzman and Wiseman. One big way that this new Mummy movie will be different than the Brendan Fraser Mummy trilogy is that it will be set in the modern day and not the 1920s-30s.

"When I first heard Universal was relaunching this, that is the image that popped into my head, the period tale, the old monster, but when Bob and Alex pitched it, there was a great new take and approach, and a very different mummy as well,” Wiseman told the site. “It’s a darker twist on the material, a scarier version."

Kurtzman said that his new Mummy will still be a scary movie but that it's also going to serve the action-adventure audience. "It’s still a four-quadrant film but as a lot of recent movies have proven, audiences are hungry for more than they used to be," he said while wearing his producer's cap. "You can still have a family movie, an action movie that’s more grounded than these used to be. Without saying too much, we’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from Michael Crichton’s books, and how he ground fantastical tales in modern-day science."

Kurtzman also added that their new Mummy character will be cunning and crafty like a man, not as a monster. The supernatural powers that the Mummy character will display will only make his reach more threatening to the heroes of the film.

The screenplay for the new Mummy is being written by Jon Spaihts (Prometheus, The Darkest Hour).

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Prometheus and The Darkest Hour screenwriter Jon Spaihts has been selected to write a reboot of Universal's The Mummy. Sean Daniels will produce the new Mummy movie; he was involved with the studio's most recent iteration of the creepy franchise, the 1999 and 2001 movies directed by Stephen Sommers.

Spaihts wants to make his Mummy movie more darker than Sommers' most recent offering.

"I see it as the sort of opportunity I had with Prometheus," Spaihts said to Variety, the source of the original story break. "To go back to a franchise's roots in dark, scary source material, and simultaneously open it up to an epic scale we haven't seen before." [Full story]

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