Immortal Effects.(Company Business and Marketing)

FOR THE MUMMY RETURNS, ILM REGENERATED THE MUMMIFIED IMHOTEP AND CONJURED UP THOUSANDS OF HORRIFIC NEW CG CREATURES

When a movie rakes in $40 million plus during its opening weekend, what's a studio to do? Ask for a sequel. And that's exactly what Universal Pictures did with its 1999 hit, The Mummy, which ranked eighth in box office revenue that year and so tar has generated $414 million. Within a week after The Mummy opened, Stephen Sommers, writer and director, was working on the sequel. That sequel, aptly named The Mummy Returns, opens May 4. Packed with even more of what people liked in the first one--high-powered action, wild visual effects, a swashbuckling hero, a beautiful heroine, really bad guys, and tongue-in-cheek humor--it could be another hit. "[The Mummy Returns] completely blew me away. There's constant action. There are constant effects. I liked the first one--but this was much more of a movie," writes Lloyd Dobler on the website, Ain't it Cool News.

"I knew I'd have more money," says Sommers, "I sat down and said, `I'm going to make the movie I've always wanted to make.'"

To help make that possible, Sommers convinced most of the cast and crew from The Mummy to join him for the sequel, including stars Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz, who are back in their roles as Rick O'Connell, the adventurer, and Evelyn, the Cairo librarian. Sommers set the action in 1935 (10 years after the first film), married the couple, settled them in London, and gave them a 9-year old son, Alex, played by newcomer Freddie Boath. Also back from The Mummy are good guys Oded Fehr playing O'Connell's sidekick Ardeth Bay, and John Hannah as Evelyn's mischievous brother Jonathan. On the evil side, Patricia Velasquez returns, this time as Meela, a malicious reincarnation of Anck-Sunamun, the character she played in the first film, and Arnold Vosloo resurrects his starring role as the ferocious, power-hungry Imhotep. Giving Imhotep a run for his mummy in the sequel is a new character, the big and very bad Scorpion King played by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson of World Wrestling Federation fame. Some say, however, that the biggest returning "star" of all is the effects studio Industrial Light & Magic.

"In this movie, the 800-pound gorilla, if you will, is ILM," Sommers says. "The Mummy had an effects shot here and there. This film has more effects and a wider range of effects. We have hundreds of shots we could not have done two years ago. It's a sequel; it has to be bigger and better."

"More effects" is an understatement. The "effects characters"--the mummified Imhotep and his soldier mummies--are back in bigger roles. In addition, thanks to Sommers' fertile imagination and ILM's effects team, new fantasy characters have joined the digital cast: fierce-looking, dog-headed warrior mummies, nasty little pygmy mummies, and a creature that's half-human, half-bug. Like the first one, this movie is filled with other computer graphics effects as well--smoke, sand, dust, scarabs--and more.

All told, a crew of around 100 people at ILM worked on 359 shots, almost double the original estimate, and each shot seems to have a different type of complex effect. "Every shot is sort of top-of-the-rocket in terms of visual effects technology," says John Berton, visual effects supervisor at ILM. "If you go through the list of films ILM has worked on over the last five years, everything that was really interesting or difficult is somewhere in our movie, arm everything that's been popularized over the last several years as a breakthrough in visual effects is in this film somewhere."