Out of the $80 million budget allotted by Universal Studios for The Mummy, $15 million was spent on special effects. It comes as no surprise that the investment needed to pull off the mystery and magic encapsulated in the movie would amount to a fair sum, and the producers didn’t want the remake to be a copy of the original.
They wanted a totally different look and effect, and they were ready to throw down for it. “The Mummy should be mean, tough, nasty—something that the audience hadn’t seen before,” John Andrew Berton Jr. said. He was the Industrial light & magic visual effects supervisor for The Mummy. The team used motion capture so they could capture the movements of the actor playing the mummy and achieve “a menacing and very realistic effect.”
It’s A Yes
Stephen Sommers had a totally different approach to the remake in mind. He didn’t see it as dark and mystical or romantic reincarnation the way his failed predecessors had. He saw it as a whimsical, but kind of scary adventure, à la Indiana Jones.
He brought Jacks and Daniel into the picture and made his pitch. It would be as simple as the mummy giving the hero a hard time, a nuisance to be dealt with rather than a terrifying dark force. With a kiss of luck to an 18-page proposal, Sommers pitched the idea to Universal Studios. Guess what? Universal didn’t just love it. They marked up the budget from $15 million to $80 million, and the remake hit the big screen in 1999.
Who’s Patricia Velasquez?
Have you heard of Patricia Velasquez? If you haven’t, keep on reading. You need to know more about this legendary woman. Velasquez is a Venezuelan actress and model, and she is the world’s first Latina supermodel who came out to the world as a loud and proud lesbian woman. She’s not just a model, she is also a writer.
In February 2015, she released her memoir, titled Straight Walk. She opened up about her life and personal experiences to her readers, discussing issues such as the poverty she experienced at an early age, as well as her relationship with the American comedian and writer, Sandra Bernhard.
The Mummy Look
Berton did a lot of work to create the mummy. He combined live action and computer graphics, studying Arnold Vosloo’s facial features to match digital prosthetic makeup pieces on his face. Berton explained the struggle that he had experienced to achieve the perfect mummy look for Vosloo. “When you see Vosloo on the screen, that’s really him. When he turns his head and half of his face is missing, and then you can see his teeth, that’s really his face,” Berton explained.
As for the actor himself, Vosloo described his experience on The Mummy as a “whole new thing” for him. The prosthetics team had to put little red tracking lights all over Vosloo’s face so they could perfectly map in the special effects. “A lot of the time, I was walking around the set looking like a Christmas tree,” Vosloo admitted.
Varying Responses
Following its release in theatres, reactions to The Mummy were mixed. On the one hand, Rotten Tomatoes, a popular review-aggregation site for film and TV series, gave The Mummy a 57% rating. That’s a 5.7 out of 10. Most of the netizens on Rotten Tomatoes came to a consensus. “The Mummy was undeniably fun to watch, but...” But. There has always got to be a “but.” “But it’s difficult to make a persuasive argument for The Mummy as any kind of meaningful cinematic achievement.”
Metacritic even rated the film lower than Rotten Tomatoes. They only gave a 48% rating. They said that it was caused by the hoard of “average reviews.” On the other hand, the cinema records said that the audience loved the film and asked for a sequel. At the end of the day, that was what everyone behind the scenes wanted—for the audience to love and enjoy the film. Haters gonna hate.