His brief, CGI-heavy appearance in The Mummy Returns was promoted heavily on Monday Night RAW and Thursday Night Smackdown, and The Scorpion King was positioned as the film that would catapult him from guest player to major movie star. That man was, at the time, credited almost exclusively as ' The Rock,' and was best known for popping up on TV every Monday and Thursday night (and once a month on pay-per-view) as one of the WWE's most bankable and commanding superstars. RELATED: Stream The Mummy Trilogy on Peacock Now The result was The Scorpion King (now streaming on Peacock!), a film that didn't endure nearly as well as The Mummy or The Mummy Returns, but which still ranks as an important piece of the franchise thanks in no small part to the man the studio picked to lead it. While the iron was hot, Universal decided instead to take an antagonist from the end of The Mummy Returns, put him 5,000 years in the past, and give him his own origin story. Yes, we eventually did a get third installment in the Mummy series proper, but that didn't come until Tomb of the Dragon Emperor a few years later. What was less predictable was what we actually ended up getting.

Stephen Sommers' one-two punch of period action/adventure worked extremely well for the studios as the '90s became the '00s, so a follow-up felt inevitable. After the success of The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, you had to know that Universal Pictures was going to work on continuing the franchise.

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