Rachel Weisz is back in the frame as Michael Johnston enters early talks for the next The Mummy film from Universal Pictures. If the deal makes, he would join Brendan Fraser and John Hannah in a sequel scheduled for October 15, 2027.
That puts Johnston, who stars as Bear in Curry Barker’s Obsession, inside a franchise that has already shown it can carry major box-office weight. The Mummy and The Mummy Returns both topped $400M worldwide, and the new film is being positioned with the same commercial ambition.
Johnston’s Obsession breakout
Michael Johnston’s latest calling card is Bear, the lovelorn twenty-something at the center of Obsession. The film has become Focus Features’ top-grossing title of all time at over $458M worldwide, which gives Johnston a very different kind of leverage than a simple genre credit would.
That matters because franchise casting now runs on two tracks at once: whether an actor can handle the role, and whether the actor arrives with visible momentum. Johnston has spent nearly 15 years in screen acting, but Obsession is the project that pushed him into the kind of territory that gets him considered for a large-scale studio sequel.
Fraser, Weisz, and Hannah
Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz and John Hannah are expected to star opposite Johnston if the deal makes. That pairing ties the new film directly back to the earlier The Mummy films, which followed Rick O’Connell and Evelyn Carnahan and helped make Fraser one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.
The Mummy arrived in 1999, and The Mummy Returns followed in 2001. Stephen Sommers directed both, and the box-office ceiling they set still matters here: a sequel with returning names has a built-in benchmark that the new film will be measured against from day one.
Early talks, not final
Johnston is still in early talks, so the casting is not locked. That leaves the franchise with its most important immediate question: whether the team turns a breakout horror lead into a permanent piece of a studio sequel, or keeps the role open while the rest of the package comes together.
Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett are directing, David Coggeshall wrote the script, and Sean Daniel is producing alongside William Sherak, James Vanderbilt, Paul Neinstein, Clayton Townsend and Jason F. Brown. For now, the smart read is simple: Universal Pictures is building around proven franchise names, and Johnston is being tested as the new face that can sit beside them.
