Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, released in 2023, is a three-and-a-half-hour epic about the systematic murder of Osage Nation members in 1920s Oklahoma, orchestrated by white settlers and their associates who stood to profit from the oil rights that Osage land held. Fraser played W.S. Hamilton, a lawyer connected to the scheme — a small but specific role in a very large film. The casting continued the pattern of Aronofsky’s call: a director of significant cultural standing saw something in Brendan Fraser worth engaging, and engaged it.
Scorsese commented publicly on Fraser’s casting, using language that reflected the specific physical quality that Hamilton required. The performance was brief by comparison to The Whale, but its placement within one of the year’s most significant films was a clear indicator of where Fraser’s career had arrived: not back at the summer franchise market that had made him famous in 1999, but at the table of serious filmmakers working in serious material, where his range and his particular quality of presence were understood as assets.
He had, by the time of the Killers of the Flower Moon release, already said that he was being “really picky” with his choices. The Oscar had not opened a floodgate of franchise offers; it had given him the standing to turn things down that didn’t interest him and accept things that did. The reported return to the Mummy franchise — a fourth film with him as Rick O’Connell — was among the projects in various stages of discussion or development. Whether that project, and others, would materialize depended on the specifics of production financing and scheduling that the public record as of 2026 had not fully resolved.