Despite only being in theaters for two weeks, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy has crossed an important box office milestone. Starring Jack Reynor, May Calamawy, and Laia Costa, the supernatural horror film follows a family who is reunited with her long lost daughter, who was found mummified in a sarcophagus, but soon learns that something is wrong with her.
The Irish director Lee Cronin is most known for 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, which was significantly profitable, making $147 million on a budget of roughly $19 million. Some have criticized Cronin for putting his name in the movie’s title, but it was largely a way to differentiate the New Line Cinema and Atomic Monster production from The Mummy 4, the upcoming action-oriented reboot of the franchise with Brendan Fraser. Regardless, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, which released on April 17 in the US, is already looking like another notch in the director’s belt.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is already profitable at the box office
As of April 27, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy has earned a total of $65 million at the box office so far, with $23 million of that coming domestically and $42 million coming internationally, as noted by Box Office Mojo. Given that the reported budget of the horror film is $22 million, this means that it has become profitable within a short period of time.
This $22 million production budget comes from Deadline, so if we follow the general guideline that films need to make 2.5 times its budget to be profitable, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy only needs to reach $55 million to break even. This would mean that the movie has already earned $10 million in profit, and anything else it’s able to gather throughout the remainder of its theatrical run will only add to this total.
This is particularly good news because Lee Cronin’s The Mummy had a box office prediction a week before its release that it would earn $15 million to $20 million in its domestic opener, but it was only able to earn $13.5 million across 3,304 theaters. The film also didn’t have the same reaction from critics, which has a 46% Tomatometer rating based on 170 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes (as of April 27), when compared to the director’s first two films, Evil Dead Rise and The Hole in the Ground, that achieved ratings in the mid-80s. Some reviewers said they were disappointed by the movie’s attempt to put The Mummy into Evil Dead Rise’s framework and for its reliance on common horror tropes ripped from classics like The Exorcist.
Fortunately, audiences have had a far better reception to the film’s reinterpretation of The Mummy. It has a 75% Popcornmeter rating based on over 1,000 verified audience scores, with many horror fans appreciating that it’s inspired by The Conjuring and Insidious franchises rather than taking too much from the Egyptian aesthetic. More importantly, a good number of moviegoers said they were genuinely scared by the film.
The box office performance of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is a bright sign for the horror genre too since it has had mixed results in 2026 thus far. Several successes include Scream 7 that earned $214 million on a $45 million budget and Markiplier’s Iron Lung that made $52 million on a low budget of $3 million. However, the horror romance film The Bride was a box office flop, getting $23 million on a budget of $90 million. Other horror movies have struggled to reach the 2.5x threshold as well, like Send Help, Return to Silent Hill, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, and They Will Kill You. Some of these have ended their theatrical run yet, though they don’t have that much more time to make up ground.
