The news this week that Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz are to return in a new Mummy film for the first time in a quarter of a century feels a bit like Hollywood stumbling out of a very long house party it doesn’t entirely remember attending. The last time the pair appeared together was 2001, when The Mummy Returns (itself an insipid sequel to 1999’s much better The Mummy) hit multiplexes. Since then we’ve had a spin-off (2002’s The Scorpion King, featuring an early turn from Dwayne Johnson) and a second sequel that didn’t feature Weisz, 2008’s forgettable The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.

And then, of course, there was the ill-fated “Dark Universe”, forever immortalised by that solemn publicity photograph of Russell Crowe (Dr Jekyll), Javier Bardem (Frankenstein’s Monster), Tom Cruise and Johnny Depp (The Invisible Man) staring into the middle distance like an ageing goth supergroup. The plan was to launch an interconnected saga in which Jekyll would act as a sort of monster-movie Nick Fury, corralling Dracula, Frankenstein and assorted undead assets into a synergised Marvel-style cinematic ecosystem. Fortunately it rapidly fell apart: 2017’s Cruise-led The Mummy landed with all the grace of a cursed sarcophagus dropped down a lift shaft. And that, as far as the Dark Universe was concerned, was that. Universal pivoted to smaller films such as Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, while Bardem’s Monster and Depp’s Invisible Man never materialised at all.

Now it appears the studio has reverted to that pre-2010s era in which movies often featured a clear, linear story, sometimes with a beginning, middle and end. In the absence of any other clear plans for The Mummy, you can’t really blame it. Fraser is in the middle of a career resurgence off the back of Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, and Weisz has never been away. If the original Fraser-Weisz-era Mummy filled a gap created by Steven Spielberg’s refusal to make more Indiana Jones movies, this belated sequel has the advantage of debuting when the latter series looks dead and buried after the lukewarm response to Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Is the era of cinematic universes as a whole now coming to an end? Sony’s Spider-Man-without-Spider-Man experiment has limped quietly away. The Flash felt less like a triumphant multiverse caper than DC’s continuity collapsing in on itself. And while Marvel Studios is hardly packing up the Infinity Stones just yet, there are persistent whispers that the next pair of Avengers films – Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars – may function as a convenient narrative reset.

And yet the reality is that audiences don’t so much hate cinematic universes as feel disgruntled when studios announce entire multiversal macro-sagas before anyone has seen the credits roll on the first instalment. When Marvel brought out Iron Man in 2008, there were already plans to unite Tony Stark with Captain America and Thor in Avengers movies, but the studio made sure all these entries worked before trying to mash them together. The best part of two decades on, the studio is facing diminishing box office returns and (arguably) multiverse fatigue after trying too hard to turn casual viewers into reluctant archivists.

Perhaps this is why the prospect of a new Mummy film feels faintly radical. No extended monster roll-call, no roadmap presentation disguised as narrative, no solemn announcement that Dr Jekyll will return in Tomb of the Shared Continuity. Just a brisk, pulpy adventure in which attractive people sprint towards danger, exchange flirtatious barbs and resolve the central problem. In 1999 this was simply called “a blockbuster”. In 2026 it may qualify as niche programming.

And maybe that is the lesson beneath Universal’s strategic retreat. Audiences did not revolt against interconnected storytelling so much as grow weary of being conscripted into it. The connective tissue became the point. The scaffolding overshadowed the structure. What began as an occasional thrill – a cameo here, a crossover there – slowly mutated into homework. A Fraser-Weisz reunion, by contrast, promises something almost unfashionable: narrative closure. If it works, it will not be because it resurrects an old property, but because it resurrects the until-recently-unfashionable idea that a story can simply conclude.