Is “Mummy” a sign of things to come?

The Mummy Returns opened in Australia with an enormous (for Australia) $3.5 million. “The Mummy‘s hype worked,” commented the Sydney Daily Telegraph. “We heard about its U.S. success and slavishly, we followed.” The newspaper said that the film’s international distributor, UIP “budgeted for big — but not that big,” and it quoted Mike Selwyn, UIP’s managing director in Sydney, as saying, “Cinema is back at the forefront of people’s minds. … This is going to be a huge year.”