The Mummy was a summer entertainment in the specific tradition of films that function as communal pleasure events — films that are designed to be watched with a crowd, to produce laughter and surprise and mild terror and relief in a theatre full of people who are all experiencing the same thing at the same time. The pleasure of that kind of film is partly social: you are having an experience together, and the experience is heightened by being shared. George of the Jungle had found this quality for younger audiences in 1997. The Mummy found it for everyone in 1999.
But the specific emotional texture of The Mummy’s cultural legacy has something to do with the historical moment of its audience. The people who were teenagers and young adults in 1999 — who saw The Mummy at fourteen or sixteen or nineteen, in the summer, in a multiplex, with friends — are in their thirties and forties in 2022 and 2023. They have their own accumulated histories. They have experienced the ways that life does not proceed according to plan, the specific quality of setback and recovery and changed expectation that constitutes adult experience.
When those viewers watched the Venice ovation footage in September 2022, they were not simply watching an actor receive recognition for a performance. They were watching someone their own age — someone who had been part of the soundtrack of their youth — receive recognition after a long period of difficulty. The emotional investment was real and was rooted in something more than nostalgia.