This Christmas week, Black can be seen in a reboot of the cult 1997 monster movie<\/a> Anaconda, in which Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube were terrorised by a giant snake. The new Anaconda is more intentionally funny than the so-bad-it\u2019s-charming original, with Black starring as an Anaconda superfan who decides to remake the movie with his best friend, played by Paul Rudd. Venturing to the Amazonian jungle, the pair unfortunately encounter an actual, real-life 25 ft snake.<\/p>\n The new Anaconda has been torn apart by critics, but it\u2019s speculated to gross at least $20m in its opening weekend in the US, which should quickly put it in profit considering its low budget of just $45m. And it could follow a similar trajectory as April\u2019s The Minecraft Movie, which starred Black as a doorknob seller transported into a video game world, and ended up grossing a colossal $958m at the global box office.<\/p>\n Long since removed from his acclaimed, star-making performances in movies such as High Fidelity and School of Rock, Black hasn\u2019t led a live-action movie that\u2019s been a hit with critics since 2017. That was when his other Nineties reboot Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle drew enough positive reviews to eke out a 77 per cent average score on the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes.<\/p>\n Despite such creative stagnation, his work reliably seems to print money, with Welcome to the Jungle and its 2019 sequel The Next Level collectively grossing nearly $2 billion at the box office (another sequel is due next Christmas). Last year\u2019s Kung Fu Panda 4, the latest installment in a franchise trading largely on his comic persona (in panda form), grossed half a billion. Even his dismal straight-to-streaming 2024 comedy Dear Santa has seen success, with the movie sitting among the most-watched movies on Paramount+ at the time of writing. (An outlier? Last year\u2019s disastrous video game movie Borderlands \u2013 but perhaps it might have made money if it placed Black centre stage, rather than asking him to merely voice a robot?)<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t seem to matter that critics have been largely unkind to Black\u2019s recent output, either. Writing in her review of The Minecraft Movie, The Independent\u2019s film critic Clarisse Loughrey lamented Black\u2019s performance in particular<\/a>, writing: \u201cHe delivers lines in the desperate tenor of a clown at an under-attended children\u2019s birthday party.\u201d Still, exit polls in the US suggested that 28 per cent of audiences sought out<\/a> The Minecraft Movie solely because of Black, suggesting they\u2019d follow him anywhere.<\/p>\n Somewhat unusually, Black this week admitted to paying attention to the success of his own movies. \u201cThis is gross and I shouldn\u2019t reveal it, but I like to go on to Box Office Mojo and see how well a film did at the weekend,\u201d he told The Times<\/a>. \u201cHow are the numbers? It\u2019s a f***ing fun game. It\u2019s a competition.\u201d<\/p>\n He\u2019ll be happy about Anaconda at least, which looks set to pull in big figures over the Christmas break and into the New Year \u2013 despite threats from the likes of Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet\u2019s Marty Supreme and the Sydney Sweeney thriller The Housemaid. On that note, much has been made of Sweeney\u2019s recent box office woes<\/a>, but there might be a simple solution: throw her in something with Jack Black, and presumably let the money roll in.<\/p>\n \u2018Anaconda\u2019 is in cinemas<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":375901,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[236,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-375900","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=375900"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375900\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/375901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=375900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=375900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=375900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Flogging](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/AP25346669257540.jpeg\")
Flogging a dead boar: Jack Black in the (probable) hit comedy \u2018Anaconda\u2019 (AP)<\/p>\n