No one would blame you for missing it. You watched Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, a professor named Bixler showed up, you didn’t think twice about it, and you went home. That was the whole plan.
Then Cronin gave an interview to Collider where he explained what he did, which is the least subtle version of hiding something possible. The Mummy and Evil Dead share a universe now and its up to us to decide what that means.
The Name You Missed
Mark Mitchinson plays Professor Bixler in The Mummy. He is an Archaeologist. You know the type. Probably has a bad feeling about this, does not survive having a bad feeling about it.
If you watched Evil Dead Rise, that name might mean something. Bethany Bixler is Beth. The woman trying to hold her family together while her sister gets possessed in a Los Angeles apartment building and starts doing things that are deeply unpleasant to think about. Same last name.
Cronin’s exact words to Collider: “If you pay attention to the name of the archeology professor in the movie, he could be a distant relative of some key characters in Evil Dead Rise.”
He could be. The director put the name there on purpose and then talked about it in an interview. You can decide how ambiguous that is. I have already decided.
What the Evil Dead Canon Looks Like Now
Evil Dead Rise did not reboot anything when it came out in 2023. It continued the same line that Sam Raimi started in 1981 and that has since expanded to include the original trilogy, the 2013 remake, and Ash vs. Evil Dead. Cronin stepped in as steward of that whole thing.
The Deadites, the Necronomicon, and a journalist’s daughter who vanishes into the desert and comes back eight years later as something that no longer qualifies as a daughter now all share the same reality. That is a lot of mythology in one place and somehow none of it feels like it is crashing into anything else.
