"I knew I was going to write the sequel 12 hours after the first one opened,” Sommers said. “6 a.m. Saturday morning Ron Meyer called me and said, 'Your movie is going to make $44 million this weekend in the United States alone. We want a sequel.' I was just like, 'Yeah, let me have a pot of coffee and I will think about it.'”
Luckily for Universal Pictures, Sommers agreed to write “The Mummy Returns,” a sequel that many are already calling more action-packed and entertaining than its predecessor. The film, which managed to recast all of its original stars and even add WWF superstar The Rock to its cast, took some work though to get off the ground.
Sommers knew that his script had to be something special to get back the film’s two main stars-- Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz-- so Sommers began to research past successful sequels to learn what exactly makes a good sequel.
“I remember asking Stephen what makes a good sequel one morning since so few are actually as good as the original films,” Arnold Vosloo, who returns as the ‘Mummy’ Imhotep, recalled. “He replied that the ones that are the good are the ones that are the same, but different.”
“I knew I wanted to write the sequel, but Rachel would rather be on the stage and Brendan knew I was going to beat the living crap out of him during the shoot,” Sommers said. “I mean, for this film alone I blew out his knee, broke one of his ribs-- which he had for the last ten days or two weeks of shooting-- and tore a disc in his back, but he knew all this going in. That is why I knew the script had to be good enough to get the actors back, because I knew if one of them didn't want to come back I didn't want to do it.”
“They had to bend my arm to get me back,” Oded Fehr, who returns for his role as Ardeth Bay, joked. “I was originally supposed to die in “The Mummy” but didn’t. After that I was like, this is it.”
