The Mummy Director Lee Cronin’s Strange Connection To Star Trek: The Original Series

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Lee Cronin, who directed the recent Mummy remake from Blumhouse, has a surprising link to the classic science fiction series Star Trek: The Original Series. Before achieving global recognition with The Mummy, Cronin was an Irish filmmaker known for his supernatural horror films, including The Hole in the Ground and Evil Dead Rise.

Starring Jack Reynor and Natalie Grace as the Mummy, the film follows an American family whose daughter, Katie, goes missing in Egypt. Years later, she’s found, but has become a terrifying supernatural creature and begins to haunt them. Directed by Lee Cronin, The Mummy was a successful horror movie, earning over $80 million globally on a $22 million budget.

Lee Cronin recently discussed The Mummy with Johan Albrechtsen from Moovy TV. During the conversation, Albrechtsen revealed a surprising connection between Cronin and Star Trek: Gene L. Coon, a writer and producer for Star Trek: The Original Series, actually used “Lee Cronin” as a pen name. Coon wrote several episodes under this pseudonym, including the well-known episode, “Spock’s Brain.” You can watch the clip from Moovy TV here:

Director Lee Cronin knows about the earlier “Lee Cronin” who worked on Star Trek. He finds the coincidence unusual. Gene L. Coon used the pseudonym “Lee Cronin” for some Star Trek: The Original Series episodes because he was contracted to MGM at the time and couldn’t be credited with his real name.

Gene L. Coon, writing under the pseudonym Lee Cronin, penned several memorable episodes of the original Star Trek series, including “Spectre of the Gun,” “Wink of an Eye,” “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” and the well-known, but controversial, “Spock’s Brain.”

While many fans consider “Spock’s Brain” the worst episode of the original Star Trek, it’s hard to forget, just like the other stories written by Lee Cronin.

Gene L. Coon was a hugely influential figure in the creation of Star Trek, second only to its creator, Gene Roddenberry. He developed many of the show’s most important ideas and characters, including the United Federation of Planets, Starfleet, the Prime Directive, the Klingons, and the character of Khan Noonien Singh, played by Ricardo Montalban.

Lee Cronin, the director of The Mummy, shares a surprising connection with the early days of Star Trek. He was born in 1982, thirteen years after Gene L. Coon—a writer for Star Trek: The Original Series—used “Lee Cronin” as a pen name. Interestingly, many of those original Star Trek episodes had a horror element, linking the director to the pseudonym used by the show’s writer.

I’ve been hearing a lot about how well Lee Cronin’s The Mummy did, and it’s got me thinking – maybe Paramount Skydance will ask him to direct a new Star Trek film! It would be really interesting to see what he’d do with that franchise.

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2026-05-06 03:18