This time last year, Michael Johnston was fifteen years into a career that hadn’t quite broken through. He’d done his time on Teen Wolf, picked up smaller roles here and there, and built a reputation as a reliable working actor who’d never quite landed the moment that changes everything. Then Obsession came out, earned over $450 million worldwide on a budget under a million dollars, and changed the math entirely.
Now Johnston is in early talks to join The Mummy 4 alongside Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz, Variety confirmed, with The Hollywood Reporter and other outlets echoing the report shortly after. No deal is finalized yet and Universal Pictures hasn’t commented publicly, but the talks are real — and the role, if it closes, would be Johnston’s first major studio booking in the direct aftermath of the film that made his name.
What We Know About His Potential Role
Character details are being kept deliberately vague, which is standard for a production that hasn’t publicly confirmed its full roster. One theory gaining traction among fans and industry insiders is that Johnston may be portraying Alex O’Connell, the son of Rick and Evelyn, a character who was played by a younger actor in The Mummy. Tomb of the Dragon Emperor — now aged up significantly since that 2008 entry, EpicStream noted. That would make him the connective tissue between the original cast and a younger generation of characters, giving Universal a way to transition the franchise forward while keeping Fraser and Weisz central.
Johnston himself addressed the reports in a conversation with Collider, calling the prospect of working with directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett — collectively known as Radio Silence — “incredible,” per Collider. He stopped well short of confirming anything, but the enthusiasm wasn’t diplomatic. Radio Silence, whose credits include Ready or Not and the recent Scream films, is a significant draw for an actor coming off a horror breakout — the creative alignment between what Johnston has just done and what that directorial team is known for is hard to miss.
The Obsession Effect
The speed at which Johnston has moved from horror breakout to franchise consideration tells you something about how dramatically Obsession shifted his standing in the industry.
The film, directed by Curry Barker and distributed by Focus Features, was made for less than a million dollars — a figure that still feels almost impossible against what it earned. Johnston plays Bear, a young man who makes a supernatural deal to win over his crush and watches the consequences spiral well beyond anything he bargained for. His performance was widely praised as the kind of committed, fully inhabited work that turns a low-budget horror film into something critics actually discuss, and the box office response turned that critical attention into commercial proof, World of Reel reported.
Universal moving quickly to keep Johnston within the studio family — if that’s what this casting represents — would follow a pattern the industry runs on: identify who just broke through, book them before the window narrows. The studio hasn’t said that out loud, but the timing of the talks, arriving just months after Obsession’s theatrical run, makes the logic obvious, CGO Movies observed.
The Franchise Coming Together
The wider picture around The Mummy 4 is gradually clarifying. Beyond Johnston’s potential addition, the confirmed returning cast already carries significant weight: Fraser as adventurer Rick O’Connell, Weisz as Evelyn Carnahan, John Hannah as Jonathan Carnahan, and reportedly Arnold Vosloo and Kevin J. O’Connor reprising their roles as Imhotep and Beni. It would mark the first time Fraser and Weisz have appeared in a Mummy film together since The Mummy Returns in 2001 — an absence of more than two decades that the new film’s production apparently treats as a feature rather than a complication, ScreenRant confirmed.
Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett are directing from a script by David Coggeshall, who wrote Scream VI — another Radio Silence collaboration. The production is expected to begin shooting this fall, with Universal holding an October 15, 2027 release date, The GWW reported. The creative team has said explicitly that the continuity of The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor — the 2008 sequel that replaced Weisz with Maria Bello and moved the story to China — is not being treated as canon for this new installment. That decision effectively gives them a clean slate following the events of The Mummy Returns.
Why Johnston Fits
Beyond the obvious commercial logic of attaching a newly minted breakout name to an established franchise, the casting makes a certain amount of creative sense. Obsession worked partly because Johnston was convincing as someone in over his head — a regular person navigating something completely outside their experience, which is essentially the emotional core of every Mummy film since 1999.
Brendan Fraser’s Rick O’Connell was never superhuman. He was resourceful, funny, terrified in the right moments, and just capable enough to survive a situation no one would reasonably survive. If Johnston is playing Rick and Evelyn’s son, he’d be carrying a version of that same quality into the next generation — the reluctant hero who rises to the occasion not because they were built for it but because there’s nobody else, Entertainment Now noted.
Johnston is represented by CAA and Brillstein Entertainment. Universal has yet to announce any additional cast members beyond the returning stars already confirmed.
The Mummy 4 opens in theaters October 15, 2027. Production begins this fall.
