Welcome (Back) To The Jungle

Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Karen Gillan, and Kevin Hart get extra lives as the game continues in JUMANJI: THE NEXT LEVEL…

- James Hanton

It’s fair to say that nobody expected 2017’s Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle to be quite the success it ended up being. It picked up the pieces of the beloved Robin Williams classic Jumanji (1995) by changing almost everything except the title. Technically the third film in the series (if you count 2005’s Zathura: A Space Adventure), it seems almost completely disconnected. Jumanji looked like Sony’s latest stalling attempt at kickstarting a cinematic universe to rival Disney’s and Warner Bros’, following the relative failure of The Mummy and Power Rangers earlier in the year. And yet, the third time proved a charm. Welcome to the Jungle went down like a storm, coming close to $1 billion at the box office. Not even the hardest nosed critics could avoid the beaming sense of fun; a classic example of what can happen when you combine old school appeal with a cast so prepared to throw themselves into the silliness of it all. Distinctly different from the original but without forgetting it, it smacked of a more traditional blockbuster appeal, but it worked precisely for that reason. The Christmas period thrives off simple, easy to enjoy resolution stories like this. Yet this was not without risk, and it really was touch and go as to whether this was going to work. The film’s ending didn’t leave you expecting a follow-up like the ending to The Mummy did… but here we are.