According to Vulture, Universal Pictures has hired The Hunger Games screenwriter Billy Ray to write the script for their reboot of classic horror franchise The Mummy – the studio had perviously entrusated the job to Prometheus’ Jon Spaights.
Vulture added, “hiring two screenwriters to work on competing Mummy projects at the same time, the studio believes it is effectively doubling its chances that it will at least have one Mummy script that’s camera-ready by the late summer or early fall.”
An insider told the site, “Studios don’t shoot movies anymore. They shoot release dates. My suspicion is that one of them will be a ‘structure-and-body’ man, and one’s going to be a ‘character-and-dialogue’ man — and that they’ll then just gang-bang them together into one script, crediting both writers, because credit arbitration is usually a nightmare.”
The Mummy is being directed Underworld‘s Len Wiseman, and produced by Alice In Wonderland‘s by Joe Roth and Star Trek‘s Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci
The original 1932 Universal horror movie The Mummy is available on Blu-ray from 1 October 2012, pre-order it now from Amazon.co.uk priced £10.
