Sony has released a second trailer for Jumanji: Open World, the third and, we are assured, final outing for the Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black and Karen Gillan line-up. The studio’s caption for the new footage reads “Our world. New rules. One final game.”, which is a tidy way of telling the audience that the writers have been given permission to ignore the old rules. The film arrives in cinemas on Christmas Day.
The hook is a reversal. In 1995, Chris Van Allsburg’s picture book became a Robin Williams film in which a board game emptied a jungle’s worth of wildlife into a New Hampshire town; in 2017 the series traded cardboard for a cartridge and sent four teenagers into the machine instead. Now the console has been left behind altogether and the game comes to us. Reports of the first trailer, back in July, described the avatars arriving in the real world as stilted versions of themselves, which is the most honest thing this franchise has ever done. Dwayne Johnson has spent two films playing a man called Smolder Bravestone, whose entire personality is a list of strengths and weaknesses on a character select screen, so watching him lumber through suburbia like an arcade cabinet stuck in attract mode on Skegness seafront looks a lot like truth in advertising.
The business case isn’t hard to find. Welcome to the Jungle took roughly $962 million worldwide and The Next Level about $802 million, the kind of arithmetic that tends to make a studio discover a deep artistic need for another chapter.
Behind the camera, Jake Kasdan is back in the director’s chair, working from a script he wrote with Jeff Pinkner and Scott Rosenberg, with Henry Jackman again on music. Alex Wolff, Madison Iseman, Morgan Turner and Ser’Darius Blain return as the real-world players, joined by familiar faces including Danny DeVito, Awkwafina, Nick Jonas and Rhys Darby. The newcomers are where British genre fans may sit up: Burn Gorman, Torchwood’s Owen Harper, and Tony Curran, who played Vincent van Gogh opposite Gillan’s Amy Pond in the Doctor Who episode “Vincent and the Doctor”, have both joined the cast. Doctor Who and Torchwood both getting a look-in at the Christmas multiplex is not something we would have predicted in 1995.
There is also word that the dice from the original film turn up as a nod to Robin Williams which, if true, is the sort of tribute that costs a studio nothing and means rather a lot to the people who grew up with it. Sony moved the release from 11th December to Christmas Day back in March, presumably on the theory that nobody is better placed to be dragged to the cinema than a family that has just finished the sprouts.
Here at SFcrowsnest magazine, we have a soft spot for any series that reinvents itself without being asked, though we treat the word “final” the way we treat “limited edition”: with respect, and a raised eyebrow. Sony insists this is the end. If so, someone should tell Chessington, which has had its own World of Jumanji for a few years now and, one assumes, a gift shop’s worth of stock to shift.
Trailer link: https://youtu.be/GfRfgzvmWtw
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