With The Mummy cleaning up at the box office, director Lee Cronin is lining up future projects – but A Nightmare On Elm Street may have to wait.
Lee Cronin‘s had himself a really good weekend, with his latest film, the possessively titled Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, cleaning up at the box office (US $34 million global against a budget of $22 million, according to Box Office Mojo). That puts it on track to be a respectable hit, although perhaps not as big an earner as his previous film, 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, which netted US $147 million.
Nonetheless, it does put him in a good position when it comes to setting up future projects, and in a new interview over at Variety, Cronin shed some light on his upcoming slate – which may, fingers crossed, include a trip to Elm Street.
Before that, though, is his long-gestating film Box Of Bones, which Cronin has been developing since shortly after finishing his first film, 2019’s Irish folk horror, The Hole In The Ground. Details are scant, but the director says the project is “…really, really appealing to me — it’s kind of burning in my mind. So I’m sitting at my new desk in my new house, and I’m like, ‘Is this the thing that’s going to start polluting the desk?’”
Also coming up is Spiral, a television series co-created with Glenn Montgomery in conjunction with Blumhouse and Atomic Monster on, which I set in 1980s Ireland, the series is apparently “…dripping in folklore, repression and the strangeness of the Irish countryside.”
But there’s always the lure of franchise filmmaking, something Cronin has already engaged in with Evil Dead Rise. Asked what big name franchises he’d be keen to work on, Cronin named two New Line productions: The Lord Of The Rings (“That’s a world that I absolutely adore.”) and A Nightmare On Elm Street.
Now, that’s intriguing – It’s been 16 years since Freddy Kruger last menaced our screens in the 2010 remake of A Nightmare On Elm Street, and frankly nobody has really seemed to know what to do with the ol’ dream stalker since then. Cronin’s two for two when it comes to reinvigorating franchises, so him even mentioning A Nightmare On Elm Street piques our interest.
But “mentioning” is pretty much all he does, noting that he’s get a few of his own projects to clear first.
“From a horror point of view, I would find it very hard not to have a swing at ol’ Freddy Krueger, because he haunted my nightmares throughout my entire childhood and still pops up about four times a year. But I actually think it’s unlikely that my next movie will be franchise adjacent – and that’s something that feels important to me right now.”
Still, fingers crossed – at least he’s thinking about it.
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