Warner Bros. and Blumhouse certainly picked a mummy-rich time to release a new version of the cloth-wrapped terror. Sandwiched between the last stab at a Dark Universe in 2017 and the upcoming legacy sequel to the 1999 action-adventure series, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy enters a crowded field, cursed with brand confusion. Blumhouse even had to put out an all-caps disclaimer on social media: “BRENDAN FRASER IS NOT IN LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY.” To set this Mummy apart, the studios and marketing teams are using an age-old technique: Putting the director’s name in the title.
Unless you’re the writer of this article and take perverse pleasure in saying the full title, general audiences will likely refer to Lee Cronin’s The Mummy as The Mummy at any opportunity—or, if they’re Social Network‘s Sean Parker, just Mummy, it’s cleaner. Unlike Blumhouse’s other riffs on classic Universal monsters, 2020’s The Invisible Man and 2025’s Wolf Man, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy had plenty of reasons to differentiate itself. Not only is Universal not involved, as it was for the other updates, but Cronin’s film is a viscerally goopy and menacingly mean-spirited take on the character, one that’s less about a mummy and more about a little girl named Katie. With the longwinded title, Blumhouse is trying to communicate to audiences, “This ain’t your mommy’s Mummy,” even if they don’t recognize the name up front. By elevating Cronin’s name, Blumhouse launched Mummy as an auteurist project, one that communicates that the movie is a distinct vision, one that’s aesthetically and thematically consistent with his previous work.
“It wasn’t my idea,” Cronin said of the title this week. But after taking the weekend to think it over, Cronin “realized that very smart people who are more experienced and more successful than me really believed in it. It was an affirmation that they believed in me, and it gave me a great confidence in approaching the movie […] My fingerprints are in every single corner of this film.”
More importantly, the title frees his Mummy of brand confusion, because movies based on characters in the public domain have these issues as a matter of course. In 2022, Disney and Netflix battled for audience attention over two versions of Pinocchio on two separate streaming platforms. Robert Zemeckis’ live-action Pinocchio would use the Disney name as a guiding light. That’s the one with “When You Wish Upon A Star,” and Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio, released by Netflix, was the depressing one about a wooden boy learning to accept Geppetto’s death. Awkwardly, del Toro’s film also has a co-director, Mark Gustafson, a stop-motion veteran who worked on the California Raisins and Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Before 1913, most directors and actors went uncredited, but this changed with D.W. Griffith, whose name can be found above the title on Birth Of A Nation‘s theatrical posters from 1915. The studio system briefly killed the practice as studios and producers, wary of powerful artists, became the more prominent signifiers of their film’s quality. But around 1942’s Saboteur, Alfred Hitchcock began placing “Alfred Hitchcock’s” onto the titles of his films. As the studio system collapsed, directors and writers vied for more credit. Otto Preminger’s name sits ahead of 1959’s Anatomy Of A Murder, and—after a 1966 credit war between the WGA and DGA, during which directors nearly struck over the banishment of vanity credits—David Lean finally got his name above Doctor Zhivago. After that, the practice became more common. Starting with Halloween, John Carpenter began adding his name to all his movies. It was “a conscious choice,” Carpenter said in 2021. “I’m taking possession of my movies.”
An authorial stamp adds esteem, too. For Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Francis Ford Coppola and Kenneth Branagh, two brand-name auteurs, signaled to audiences that they weren’t offering Universal’s take, but that of the original authors, despite neither being a straight adaptation. The ’90s were full of sales by association. Tim Burton slapped his name ahead on Henry Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas; New Line classed up Freddy Kruger with Wes Craven’s New Nightmare; a year after the release of Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, Jim Abraham parodied the practice with Jane Austen’s Mafia!. But this wordy gamble more or less left a lasting impression. It’s still common practice to use the author’s name to distinguish Coppola’s film from Tod Browning’s.
Now, familiar directors’ names are all over movie titles. M. Night Shyamalan’s name is synonymous with twists; Guy Ritchie, gangsters in tailored suits. Quentin Tarantino doesn’t simply add his name, but also where the film sits in his filmography. Of Tyler Perry’s dozens of movies, only a few appear without his name on the poster. While it might be a little too soon for a director as fresh (and as relatively unknown to the public) as Cronin to receive a possessory title, it is materially apt. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is a distinctive film that delivers on the sales pitch. It’s a simple but effective technique with 100 years of precedent, one that distinguishes this film from others sharing the Mummy moniker. Like the family-destroying demon in the film, Lee Cronin’s very name takes possession of his Mummy and makes the title his own. We’ll know how successful this approach was when we find out the title of his next movie.
