Jumanji 3 has an official title: Jumanji: Open World.
Stars Kevin Hart, Dwayne Johnson and Jack Black made the announcement Monday night while closing out Sony‘s CinemaCon presentation in Las Vegas with the unveiling of a first trailer for the threequel.
Played for the room only, the trailer opens with a computer repairman (Lamorne Morris) coming into the home of Janice (Marin Hinkle), the mother of our teen protagonist, Spencer (Alex Wolff). Therein, he finds an old video game console. Cut to the exterior of a house with supernatural clouds brewing over it and a shot of ostriches storming through the streets of the real world.
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Later, we reunite with Spencer and friends at a restaurant where they cross paths with Spencer’s grandfather (Danny DeVito). Granddad points them to a corner booth where Dwayne Johnson’s game avatar Dr. Bravestone sits — speaking, for some reason, in a Spanish accent.
We see that the Jumanji game has invaded the real world, as the avatars of Hart, Black and Karen Gillan also show up — not as themselves but in “demo mode.”
“I’m beginning to suspect,” Black’s avatar says, “that we’re not in Jumanji.”
This leads our teen heroes back into the game world with the fate of both Jumanji and their world in their hands.
Jumanji: Open World is the third film in a series from Sony reimagining the property, about teens pulled into the world of a game, for a modern audience. First, there was Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017), and then there was Jumanji: The Next Level (2019). Both films starred Johnson, Hart, Black and Gillan as players in the Jumanji video game world, with Wolff, Madison Iseman, Morgan Turner, and Ser’Darius Blain playing the real-world teenage counterpart of the avatars.
Based on the children’s book by by Chris Van Allsburg, Sony’s new Jumanji films come on the heels of the original 1995 film iteration, a classic directed by Joe Johnston and starring Robin Williams, Kirsten Dunst and Bonnie Hunt, which told the story of a supernatural board game that unleashes jungle-based dangers into the real world. Welcome to the Jungle grossed over $962M worldwide, while The Next Level followed with more than $801 million globally.
Johnson noted in conversation with his co-stars Mondayt night that the new film features an Easter egg to Williams throughout — “one half of the original dice from the original Jumanji.” He added, “This one’s for you.”
Elsewhere in their appearance, they bantered playfully, with Hart joking that Johnson is “a mess” — “drunk as sh*t.”
Black called this film his “favorite so far” to work on, with Hart deadpanning: “I didn’t have a good time. This was not a good time for me, it was f*cking work, showing up everyday seeing [Johnson’s] stupid f*cking face.”
Black teased that the new film is “wild … pulling out all the stops.”
In this film, Hart noted, “the game rules” of Jumanji “don’t apply” — and he and his three avatar-playing co-stars play three separate versions of their character each.
Jake Kasdan returned to direct Jumanji: Open World from a script written with Jeff Pinkner and Scott Rosenberg. Matt Tolmach, Kasdan, Johnson, Dany Garcia and Hiram Garcia produced the pic alongside EPs Barry Waldman, Melvin Mar, William Teitler, Ted Field, Mike Weber and Van Allsburg.
Slated for release via Columbia Pictures on Christmas Day, the threequel’s cast also includes Rhys Darby and Nick Jonas.