News The Mummy Brendan Fraser Opens Up About What Went Wrong With The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor It turns out there is at least one big reason why the third Mummy movie felt so odd. By Matthew Byrd | Published on November 21, 2025 Photo: Universal Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Universal Pictures 2008’s The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is one of the great movies that doesn’t exist. That is to say that it’s a movie that technically exists (and actually performed well at the box office) but left such a minor impact on culture that it’s remarkably easy to forget it ever happened. The fact that it was the third entry in an otherwise beloved series that abandoned nearly everything about its predecessors makes it that much more obscure. Brendan Fraser returned, but Rachel Weisz did not. Weisz was replaced with Maria Bello, who essentially plays an entirely different version of the same character. Behind the scenes, the movie lost director and screenwriter Stephen Sommers as well as a host of legacy crew members. What we were left with was a strange story involving the mythical origins of the Terracotta Army that made little use of the franchise’s highlights and even less use of potentially incredible newcomers Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh. It was just… bizarre. Well, the good news is that we recently learned that a fourth Mummy movie is reportedly in development. While the details of that movie (including Rachel Weisz’s rumored return) haven’t been officially confirmed yet, Brendan Fraser has been talking around it quite a bit during a press tour for his new movie Rental Family. In an interview with the Associated Press, Fraser said it’s “time to give the fans what they want” and noted that “the [Mummy movie] I wanted to make is forthcoming.” Interestingly, he also offered some insight on why the third Mummy movie turned out the way it did. “The third one was a model of … how can I say this to the AP reporter? NBC had the rights to broadcast the Olympics that year,” Fraser explains. “So they put two together and we went to China. Working in Shanghai, an incredible experience. I’m proud of the third one because I think it’s a good standalone movie. We picked up and did what we do with a different crew on deck and gave it our best shot.” Fraser’s insight regarding the timing of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing does help put that movie’s somewhat cursed production in a new light. NBC and Universal Pictures (the studio behind the Fraser-led Mummy films) combined their assets in 2004. Not long after that, a script set for a third Mummy movie set in China started to make the rounds. Fraser is seemingly suggesting that NBCUniversal saw that idea as a tie-in to the much-anticipated Beijing Olympics that could play well in the Chinese film market and let that fringe benefits of that angle be the driving force behind the project. For what it’s worth, the Tomb of the Dragon Emperor script quickly gained notoriety in the trades for being quite bad. Reportedly, an earlier version of that script included quite a bit of material that never made its way into the final film, including numerous callbacks to the first two movies. It’s possible that Weisz’s decision to leave the movie (which she later attributed to scheduling problems rather than her reported issues with the script) resulted in some of those changes. However, given that there were reportedly numerous alterations made to the script that took it quite far from its original form and into troubled production territory fairly early on (not to mention the quality of the film itself), the idea that NBCUniversal was committed to seeing the project through for other reasons starts to make sense. The shame of it all is that Tomb of the Dragon Emperor really did have the potential to be something better. The aforementioned additions of Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh should have been great, and the decision to use the franchise as a vehicle for other mythologies had a lot of potential. Ultimately, though, it seems like the wheels fell off the movie pretty quickly and the studio dragged it across the finish line, partially due to corporate synergy and ulterior benefits. Here’s hoping that rumoured fourth film makes the third entry feel like even more of a blip. [end-mark] The post Brendan Fraser Opens Up About What Went Wrong With <i>The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor</i> appeared first on Reactor.

News Hannibal Bryan Fuller Says If You Didn’t Like Hannibal Season 3, You Probably Won’t Like His Season 4 Idea Can someone please just give Bryan Fuller what he wants already? By Molly Templeton | Published on November 21, 2025 Screenshot: Dino de Laurentiis Company/ Living Dead Guy Productions Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Dino de Laurentiis Company/ Living Dead Guy Productions It’s been a full decade since Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal went off the air, but fans—and Fuller—have never given up hope that the gang may someday be reunited and the series return to life. In 2024, star Mads Mikkelsen said, “It’s no secret that all of us who were part of the cast and Bryan, we all want to go back.” In 2022, Fuller himself said that “everyone would love to return if we had the opportunity.” That everyone includes both stars, Mikkelsen and Hugh Dancy, and much of the rest of the incredible cast as well. (Put Caroline Dhavernas back on American TV, please!) Recently, though, Fuller has gotten more specific. In September, he talked about wanting to make Silence of the Lambs with Zendaya in the Clarice Starling role—and with Mikkelsen playing Hannibal Lecter again. As Bloody Disgusting reports, Fuller has a lot more to say on the topic in an upcoming episode of the Horror Queers podcast. As is so often the case, it turns out that one big roadblock against making more Hannibal is the rights to the material. “Right now, it’s a little complicated since Martha de Laurentiis’ passing,” Fuller says. “The rights are in the process of reversion to Thomas Harris. MGM/Amazon has some. They’re all being navigated in a way that is going to be a little trickier to iron out now. They’re in process, and I keep on touching base and trying to encourage folks to get back together.” It sounds like part of his interest in Silence of the Lambs is that it may be more clearly available; Fuller says that a Lambs adaptation “may be free of certain obligations to include Gaumont [International Television], who is the studio on Hannibal. You can’t copyright a performance, you know? So there are things that we’re trying to figure out if we can get away with that would make it an easier path that might shake the possibilities loose of things that we might be hindered from doing at this point, given the status of the rights.” But he does have a plan for a fourth season of Hannibal—though he’s understandably somewhat vague about it. Fuller says he was “frustrated” with the show’s first season, which “felt a little more like traditional television.” “I thought Season 2 was better,” he says. “Season 3, I was like, ‘Okay, this is what we should be doing. This is what I want to be doing. This is the type of storytelling that I think the show can do. And there are a lot of people who don’t like Season 3, and I was like, ‘Well then, you really don’t want a Season 4, because that’s it.’ If you’re not down with Season 3, then you’re not going to be grooving on the plan for Season 4 because it’s following that arc.” The show’s third season is, like the rest of Hannibal, complicated, psychological, strange, and more of all of these things than previous seasons. It tackles Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon and ends in such a way that some people might wonder how it would be possible to continue the story at all. (It wouldn’t be the first time someone on this show seemed dead, only to have been artfully pushed to the brink of death, but not over it, by Hannibal.) An Entertainment Weekly review of the final season’s premiere episode gives a pretty solid impression of the whole thing: “The sumptuous cinematography, the abstract imagery, the fluid editing, the jazzy-industrial score, and the deeply felt minimalism of Mads Mikkelsen’s performance work together to create an effect so rich, it’s like mainlining crème brûlée with your eyes.” Please, Bryan Fuller and assorted rights holders and network execs, we would like another serving. In the meantime, Fuller’s film Dust Bunny—which stars Mikkelsen—premieres December 12th.[end-mark] The post Bryan Fuller Says If You Didn’t Like <i>Hannibal</i> Season 3, You Probably Won’t Like His Season 4 Idea appeared first on Reactor.

News Wuthering Heights Emerald Fennell Confirms Her Wuthering Heights Movie Isn’t Exactly What It Seems The word “disemboweling” is used in a Fennell quote in a way it has never been used before. By Molly Templeton | Published on November 21, 2025 Image: Warner Bros. Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Warner Bros. The latest trailer for Emerald Fennell’s take on Wuthering Heights was … well, it was something. The movie has the title in quotation marks, so it’s really “Wuthering Heights” this time. But why, punctuation pedants (implicating myself here), wanted to know? Well, we may have a small hint. Along with writing and directing the film, Fennell has “curated” a new edition of the novel for Simon & Schuster’s Female Filmmakers Collection. It is less than clear what this means, other than picking a slightly perplexing cover image (most of the Reactor staff initially thought the image, below, was more gynecological than equine-related) and writing a foreword. According to The Hollywood Reporter, “each volume will be curated by a different director, tasked with curating a movie-inspired cover, writing a new foreword, and imbuing the paperback with cinematic references and Easter eggs.” In her foreword, Fennell writes of the novel, “It is too slippery, too wild, too good to distill into two hours of film. Instead what I have attempted to do is adapt my own experience of reading it for the first time. It is an adaptation of a feeling: my first disemboweling by the baby god.” My first disemboweling by the baby god. Just sit with that for a minute. If Fennell is not actually doing a straight adaptation of Emily Brontë’s book—a theory that was already floating around out there—then it helps make sense of a few of the things in the trailer, including the quotation marks and the age of at least one of the stars. The text along with the trailer does note that the film is “inspired by the greatest love story of all time,” and “inspired by” is not the same as “based on,” though either way I take issue with the rest of that sentence. “Wuthering Heights,” which stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, is in theaters February 14, 2026. The not-a-tie-in edition of the novel arrives on shelves a bit earlier, on February 3. Surely fans will be scouring its references for hints as to what Fennell is doing.[end-mark] The post Emerald Fennell Confirms Her <i>Wuthering Heights</i> Movie Isn’t Exactly What It Seems appeared first on Reactor.

News What to Watch What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Wicked: For Good, Mr. Robot For Chaos Plus: Dev Patel is David Copperfield and all the books you haven’t read. By Molly Templeton | Published on November 21, 2025 Photo: Universal Studios and USA Network Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Universal Studios and USA Network We’re not talking about that holiday next week. You know the one. If you love it, more power to you! I will be at the bar, not doing holiday things, because that’s how I roll. But I will also be reading a lot of books. In fact that is my primary non-work plan for the rest of this year: reading books. It’s glum outside, I’m tired, my apartment is full of books. There are worse ways to spend a month. (I will also be watching Pluribus, which I finally started.) That said, it is still—and always—the season to call your reps. And to kick some leaves if they’re falling where you live. And maybe to stomp in a puddle or four. You know. Fall! Fall, slinking into winter. Long scarves and warm beverages are coming, but they’re not here just yet. Anyway, let’s watch some stuff, yeah? Yes, Dev Patel Played David Copperfield in a Movie Directed by Armando Iannucci, and That Rules Do you have a little mental list of movies that you always mean to watch, but whenever you sit down to watch something, the entire list deletes itself from your brain, only to return at some inopportune moment? I feel like I actually have a lot of these lists, and The Personal History of David Copperfield is on all of them. The thing is, this isn’t just Dev Patel as David Copperfield. It’s Dev Patel as David Copperfield, directed by Armando Iannucci. Iannucci isn’t exactly a household name, but should be; for one thing, he created Veep. But in my heart he’s primarily the writer and director of In the Loop, a political satire film spinoff of his series The Thick of It. I’ve still never seen The Thick of It, and I adore In the Loop, which features, among other delights, Twelfth Doctor Peter Capaldi saying “Fuckety-bye” with a truly biting depth of scorn. My point is, Iannucci is enjoyable, even without all the available context. The New York Times says he “exhibits a light touch” in his take on David Copperfield, which stars, along with Patel, the power trio of Tilda Swinton, Hugh Laurie, and Capaldi. And it’s got Ben Whishaw and Morfydd Clark! I have got to get to this before it leaves Hulu (where you can watch it now). You Don’t Need an Excuse To Watch Mr. Robot, But We Have One In any given year there are more TV, book, and movie anniversaries than a single human can possibly keep track of. But one particular anniversary this year didn’t get quite the attention I wish it had: the 10th anniversary of Mr. Robot. Yes, there was a panel at NYCC, and now that I’m actively searching for them, I’ve found a few articles. But, like, come on. The time was more than ripe for a lot of rich revisiting of this still-underrated show. Sam Esmail’s series was brilliant, prescient, incredibly acted—it’s one of those shows where you wonder why every single performer isn’t now the lead in seventeen new projects—brazen, daring, clever, human, biting … I could go on. The only reason I haven’t yet made it through a rewatch is because this show is dense, and smart, and requires attention and patience. The second season threw viewers into the deep end and expected you to tread water until the reality of what was happening to protagonist Eliot Alderson (Rami Malek) became clear. The constant machinations and complications are rich and elaborate—and so is the character work. (B.D. Wong is amazing in this.) If you never watched it, it’s on Netflix now. Plan your weekend(s) accordingly. Yes, I Talked About Wicked Last Week, But This Is Different In all the fuss over Wicked: For Good, it’s easy for one individual interview—especially one that’s not with one of the movie’s stars—to get overlooked. But Soraya Nadia McDonald’s interview with costume designer Paul Tazewell is simply the best thing I’ve read in connection with these big witchy spectacles. For all that John M. Chu’s Oz looks like cake overall, the details are fascinating (I’m still thinking about those damn tulips! And the water tank for Shiz!). Tazewell’s costumes are fantastic and lush across the board; he won an Oscar earlier this year for his work on the first film. McDonald’s interview isn’t only about Wicked, but about Tazewell’s career, and about fashion and justice and expression and texture and beauty—and his history with Wicked’s Cynthia Erivo, who Tazewell also costumed for Harriet. It’s just fantastic. I haven’t even seen the movie yet and I want Tazewell to win every Oscar.  It’s List-Making Season and the Books Are Looking at Me Funny The end-of-year lists are beginning to roll in, despite the fact that it’s November. I’m not looking, honestly; I haven’t read enough new books this year to have strong opinions about what’s the year’s best (yet). I have a little running list of “things that people I trust have said are very good,” and it includes Notes from a Regicide, Audition (this one and this one, though the latter isn’t SFF), Luminous, and The Everlasting, among others. (The very short list of 2025 books that I’ve already read and loved is topped by The Raven Scholar.) Am I going to get to all of these before the year ends? No, and it doesn’t matter! Reading doesn’t have to happen on a schedule. I’m just taking this little moment to remind you of that: for readers, “best of” lists are subjective tools for future shopping. Not lists of things you should have already read or ever have to read. That said, what’s good? What did you love? What’s in your pile to read if you get a minute to yourself in the next few weeks?[end-mark] The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: <i>Wicked: For Good</i>, <i>Mr. Robot</i> For Chaos appeared first on Reactor.

News Sinners Delroy Lindo Says Some of His Favorite Sinners Scenes Were Cut From the Movie Thankfully, Ryan Coogler has since released the deleted footage online. By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on November 20, 2025 Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a modern masterpiece, and one of the many compelling performances in it comes from Delroy Lindo’s portrayal of the bluesman Delta Slim. Lindo, who described his character in an interview with Gold Derby as “a virtuoso who is damaged and self-medicating and has these internal conflicts,” didn’t play the piano or harmonica before he took on the role. While shooting the film, however, he was given his first chance to sit in front of a piano and sing, something that he had never done before. In the interview, Lindo also shared that the extended scene of Delta Slim in the car with Miles Caton’s Sammie and Michael B. Jordan’s Stack included some ad-libbing on his part. “I ended up improvising at the very end of the scene, after talking about my man being lynched and going into song,” he said. “They went right along with me as I improvised; they were right there with me.” Unfortunately, those other scenes of him singing didn’t make it into the final cut of the movie. Lindo said he was disappointed, but then glad that Coogler released the deleted scene online. You can now watch Lindo as Slim singing “My Preaching” for four minutes and forty seconds in the clip below. Enjoy! [end-mark] The post Delroy Lindo Says Some of His Favorite <i>Sinners</i> Scenes Were Cut From the Movie appeared first on Reactor.