There’s bad news for anyone awaiting the sequel to 2021 flick Jungle Cruise, as stars Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt have revealed it is no longer on the cards – at least for now. The film was released just as cinemas reopened after COVID lockdowns, and was enough of a success to warrant quick plans for a follow-up.
Now, however, it seems those plans have sunk.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly as they promote their new team-up The Smashing Machine, Johnson and Blunt were asked if Jungle Cruise 2 is still en route, to which they are both quoted as replying: “I don’t think so.”
Johnson explained: “I think when Disney came under new leadership, they just shifted coming out of COVID. COVID shifted our business in a lot of ways.
“I think they looked at that property and thought, we did it once, not sure if we should revisit it again. Despite whether or not our chemistry was great.”
Frank Masi//Disney
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Blunt quipped that bosses “did not want to set sail again, and that’s fine.”
Johnson had previously expressed huge excitement at the prospect of revisiting their characters, tweeting back in 2021: “ALL ABOARD… This is going to be FUN!”
The film also starred Édgar Ramírez, Jesse Plemmons, Paul Giamatti and a much-discussed Jack Whitehall, with direction from Jaume Collet-Serra.
The Smashing Machine, meanwhile, is a very different affair, and stars Johnson as former amateur wrestler and MMA fighter Mark Kerr, with Blunt as his girlfriend Dawn Staples.
A24
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It has a solid 70% approval score on Rotten Tomatoes, with the consensus saying: “Dwayne Johnson goes the distance with his transformative turn as Mark Kerr in The Smashing Machine, a gritty biopic that sidesteps cliché even at the expense of narrative satisfaction while still landing the dramatic body blows that count.”
It had a successful premiere at the Venice International Film Festival back in September, where Johnson burst into tears and writer-director Benny Safdie won the Silver Lion.
Blunt will soon be back in comedy territory in the long-awaited sequel The Devil Wears Prada 2, which is due in May 2026 and released its teaser trailer – with a first glimpse of Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway – earlier this month.
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Shaun is an Evening News Editor at Digital Spy, with over a decade of experience reporting on all things pop culture. He has written for outlets including Metro, Attitude, Huffington Post, The Mirror, Yahoo!, Pink News and Express Online; specialising in TV, movies, soaps, music and LGBTQ+ issues. He is also a BAFTA Rocliffe-winning scriptwriter, having written episodes of the soap Hollyoaks, the official Steps musical Here & Now and multiple Offie Award-nominated plays. He studied English Literature and Drama at the University of East Anglia, and will happily talk at length about Desperate Housewives to anyone who’ll listen.