Perfect Alibi helped Sommers acquire independent funding to write and direct his first feature film, the teen racing film Catch Me If You Can, filmed for $800,000 on location in his hometown of St. Cloud. The film was sold at the Cannes Film Festival for $7 million and later debuted on video in the United States. Almost four years later, broke and in danger of having his house repossessed, he wrote and directed an adaptation of Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huck Finn for Walt Disney Pictures, as well as Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. He later wrote the screenplays for Gunmen and Tom and Huck, which he also executive produced for Disney, and worked as a staff writer at Hollywood Pictures. While there, he worked on a script called Tentacle, which he later directed under the title Deep Rising in 1998. In 1999, he wrote and directed Universal Studios' big-budget remake of The Mummy. The film was a smash hit, and Sommers received two Saturn Award nominations for Best Director and Best Writer in 2000 by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films. A successful sequel, The Mummy Returns, followed two years later, and he also co-wrote and produced 2002's The Scorpion King, a prequel/spin-off of The Mummy Returns. In 2004, Sommers founded his own company, The Sommers Company, and returned to theater screens with Van Helsing, a film pitting legendary vampire hunterGabriel Van Helsing against the triumvirate of Universal movie monsters: Count Dracula, The Wolf Man, and Frankenstein's monster. Before Van Helsing even premiered, Sommers and Ducsay began developing a spin-offTV series for NBC called Transylvania. Though featuring none of the characters from the film, the series was about a young cowboy from Texas who becomes a sheriff in Transylvania, has many strange adventures, and encounters many strange creatures. Sommers and Ducsay were to have been executive producers, and Sommers wrote scripts for the pilot and first several episodes, but NBC decided not to go through with the show. Since Van Helsing, Sommers has been attached to a number of projects. He was originally set to direct Night at the Museum, but dropped out due to creative differences. He was also attached to a remake of When Worlds Collide, a new big-screen adaptation of Flash Gordon, a swashbuckling adventure film called Airborn based on the novel Airborn, a romantic/adventure story called Big Love, and a remake of the French film Les Victimes. Sommers opted out of directing the third Mummy film, titled ', instead becoming one of its producers. Sommers directed Paramount Pictures' summer 2009 live-action adaptation of ', and also served as a producer. Around that time, he was developing a Tarzan adaptation for Warner Bros. but left the project. His most recent film, Odd Thomas, had been delayed from release indefinitely due to lawsuits against the production company, but it is now available to watch on Netflix's streaming service.
