Freelance writer Heather Pringle said she believes the movie will continue to be a big hit with audiences because standard science fiction themes like space travel and cloning are eclipsed by real-life developments in those fields. But death, she said, remains a mystery. Death is still beyond the reach of science. The box office success of The Mummy Returns is a record for a non-holiday opening. Pringle, who has written a book on mummies to be released later this month, also attributes the movie's success to ancient Egypt's appeal to the modern imagination, beginning with the opening of King Tutankhamen's tomb in 1924.
Many people regard Egypt as having some special knowledge that supersedes modern science.
And just as our culture continues to be obsessed with youth, so too were the Ancient Egyptians. They believed mummification allowed the person's spirit to rejoin the body and live forever in the afterlife. We have a very youth-oriented culture and mummies are related to that whole question of immortality. Pringle's book, The Mummy Congress, resulted from a trip to the Atacaman Desert in Chile, one of the driest places on earth, for the World Congress on Mummy Studies. Her trip to South America started out as research for an article for Discovery magazine but ended up starting her on a journey that led to the first popular account of mummies and the people who study mummies.