‘Jumanji’ Is Back to Its Old Tricks in New ‘Open World’ Trailer

The Rock is a pretty fascinating actor at this point. Not necessarily in a good way! We saw him try to return to pro wrestling after a failed coup at DC. Then, he seemingly turned over a new leaf with the release of The Smashing Machine, which earned him praise from many corners of Hollywood (though not all the ones he probably wanted), only to release the live-action Moana months later.

He’s still set to do another Benny Safdie movie, so that part of his career isn’t over, but I do wonder how many more family-oriented films he’ll do in the future. The Moana remake was as big of a flop as flops get. That isn’t the first time it has happened to Mr. Dwayne Johnson, but he presumably thought repurposing one of his old hits would excite audiences. It did not. But what if he tries that again?

Johnson’s next film will be Jumanji: Open World, the fourth in the franchise and the third in its reboot trilogy. And the new trailer promises to bring more of what we’ve come to expect of the movies: The Rock, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, and Karen Gillan pretending to be other people, while also bringing the wild animals of the game back into the real world like in the original film (as promised at the end of the last one).

The big change coming to the new films here is that Johnson, Hart, Black, and Gillan’s video game characters will go into the real world as well, finally giving us a look at what their characters are like in-game. It looks fun! I’ve completely memory-holed the other two at this point, which were “Lockdown Watches” for me, but I do remember enjoying them. If anything, one of the weirder aspects of this is seeing all of the young college-aged characters be… noticeably older compared to the last film.

The movie will release this Christmas, after moving from its December 11th release date to avoid competition with Avengers: Doomsday and Dune 3, and I’m gonna be honest, I don’t think releasing a week before or a week after is going to make a difference! January is right there, Sony! You could run the table instead of (likely) getting swallowed up by superheroes and space spice.