Anna Daniels
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle essentially took a second-tier property and gave it the top-tier treatment, a strategy which doesn’t always work out so well. The 1995 original did a respectable $262 million dollars at the worldwide box office, but the first attempt at a sequel — 2005’s Zathura: A Space Adventure, which took the conceit of a magic board game that sucks players into its world into space — fell directly on its face, earning a paltry $64 million dollars worldwide.
Welcome to the Jungle, however, had two strokes of pure brilliance going for it. The first: the plot device of said magical board game morphing into a video game, all the better to appeal to the the four hapless teenagers who stumble across it while serving detention at their high school. The second: casting A-list actors as the game’s avatars, including Dwayne Johnson as the wonderfully-named Dr. Smolder Bravestone, Jack Black as Professor Sheldon Oberon, Kevin Hart as Franklin “Mouse” Finbar, and Karen Gillan as the kickass Ruby Roundhouse.
Throw in a fantastic script co-written by Erik Sommers and Chris McKenna (who also contributed two of Mighty Marvel’s most breezy and fun offerings, Spider-Man: Homecoming and Ant-Man and the Wasp) and the sure directorial hand of Kasdan (the son of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back scribe Lawrence Kasdan), and you had a picture that emerged from seemingly nowhere as one of the most clever, eye-popping, flat-out fun movies of its year. The flick earned rave reviews, and stunned industry observers by grossing nearly a billion dollars worldwide — and with most of the same creative team returning for the sequel, the success of The Next Level didn’t catch quite so many of those observers off guard this time.
Written by: Looper
