Three films. Seven years. A trajectory that almost no horror director has matched. $3.4 million. $147 million. The Mummy opens April 17.
That’s the career so far. Most directors spend a decade building to numbers like Evil Dead Rise. Cronin got there in four years, from a modest Irish debut that almost nobody saw in cinemas to the highest-grossing film in a franchise that Sam Raimi built from $375,000 and sheer audacity in 1981.
The question now is whether The Mummy is the next step — or whether it reveals that Evil Dead Rise was the ceiling.
The Hole in the Ground (2019) — $3.4 Million
Dublin. A single mother and her young son move to the Irish countryside after something bad. There’s a sinkhole in the forest behind the house. The boy disappears into it briefly. Comes back different. Or maybe she’s imagining it.
Cronin shot it with Tom Comerford. Patient, cold, atmospheric. More interested in what a parent fears about their own child than in any conventional monster. The Irish landscape isn’t backdrop — it’s psychology made visible. Damp fields, grey skies, isolation that has nothing to do with being far from a city.
$3.4 million worldwide. 83% on Rotten Tomatoes. Saturn Award nomination for Breakthrough Director. Almost nobody saw it theatrically. Within the horror community, though, it spread the way certain films do — person to person, recommendation by recommendation, the kind of word-of-mouth that doesn’t move box office numbers but does move careers.
Sam Raimi saw it. New Line Cinema saw it. Both filed the name away.
Evil Dead Rise (2023) — $147 Million
The call came eventually. The Evil Dead franchise — dormant since 2013’s strong but underperforming reboot — needed someone. Cronin got the job.
He moved the series from the woods to a Los Angeles apartment building. Two estranged sisters. A hidden chamber uncovered by an earthquake. Flesh-possessing demons in a high-rise, nowhere to run, children in the building. Budget: $15–19 million depending on source. Opening weekend: $24.5 million from 3,402 theaters.
Final worldwide gross: $147.1 million. Net profit: $46 million. The highest-grossing film in Evil Dead franchise history — beating Fede Álvarez’s 2013 entry by $50 million, beating the original Sam Raimi film by $118 million in nominal terms. Five times its budget returned at the global box office.
It was nearly a straight-to-streaming release. New Line almost put it on HBO Max. Someone made the right call and put it in theaters instead.
What Cronin did with the franchise is worth understanding. He didn’t ignore what Evil Dead is — the commitment, the relentless escalation, the practical gore that the series built its identity on. He kept all of that. What he added was architecture. The apartment building turns claustrophobia into something spatial and tactical. The family unit — single mother, three kids, estranged sister arriving at the worst possible moment — gives the violence something to tear apart. The film earns its carnage because it first earns its stakes.
Critics noticed. 85% on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences noticed. Evil Dead Rise grossed $147.1 million worldwide on a budget of $15–19 million — the highest-grossing film in the franchise’s entire history.
The ROI That Matters
The numbers Cronin has generated aren’t just impressive in absolute terms. They’re impressive in ratio terms — which is how studios actually think about directors.
The Hole in the Ground: modest investment, modest return, high critical return. Bankable for future work.
Evil Dead Rise: $15–19 million in, $147 million out. That’s the kind of multiple — roughly 8-10x production budget at the worldwide box office — that makes a director’s phone stop being something they wait on and start being something that rings.
James Wan runs Atomic Monster. Jason Blum runs Blumhouse. Both are producing The Mummy. These are not people who attach their companies to projects carelessly. They recruited Cronin because Evil Dead Rise demonstrated something specific: he can be handed an existing horror property, maintain its identity, expand its scale, and return multiples on the investment without sacrificing critical standing.
The Mummy (2026) — April 17
This is the test that Evil Dead Rise wasn’t.
Evil Dead Rise had the franchise structure underneath it. An established audience. Pre-existing goodwill. A mythology Cronin could inhabit and redirect. The Mummy has a franchise name — but the film is a deliberate break from everything that name has previously meant. No action-adventure. No Boris Karloff. No Tom Cruise Dark Universe connection. An original horror story that uses the Mummy concept as a vehicle for something psychological and dread-based.
Jack Reynor as a journalist. His young daughter vanishes in the desert. Eight years pass. She comes back. Jack Reynor was phenomenal in Midsommar — cast against type, physically committed, genuinely disturbing. Laia Costa plays his wife. May Calamawy — Moon Knight, Ramy — in an undisclosed role. Verónica Falcón. The cast is specific and considered.
Cronin on the film: “I’m digging deep into the earth to raise something very ancient and very frightening.” Poltergeist and Se7en as influences. R-rated for strong violent content, gore, language and brief drug use. Runtime: 2 hours 13 minutes. James Wan allegedly walked out of an early screening — whether that signals concern or effective horror is an open question.
Tracking suggests a $25–40 million domestic opening — which would make it one of the stronger horror debuts of the year.
What April 17th Actually Proves
The Hole in the Ground proved Cronin could make something small and precise and haunting. Evil Dead Rise proved he could scale up without losing his voice. The Mummy will prove — or fail to prove — that he can carry a film on his own terms, without a franchise mythology already in place, at the budget level his Evil Dead Rise performance earned him.
The directors who make that third transition successfully — from debut to franchise to original at scale — become the genre’s defining voices. James Wan did it. Jordan Peele did it. Mike Flanagan, in television, did it.
$3.4 million. $147 million. Whatever The Mummy becomes — that third number will tell us whether Cronin belongs in that conversation.
Data sources: FilmDB.co.uk and TMDb. Availability of information may vary, and accuracy is not guaranteed.
HorrorMystery133 min