In the latest entry of our ongoing series, Screen Rant’s Ryan George reveals what (probably) happened in the pitch meeting for 2017 sequel Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. Updating the beloved 1995 film for the 21st century, Welcome to the Jungle is about a mismatched group of teens who get put in detention together, and discover an old confiscated video game.
With nothing better to do, they load up a game of Jumanji and prepare to start playing – only to be sucked into the game and given the bodies of player characters that don’t necessarily match up with their real-world counterparts. Thus, Dwayne Johnson gets to play the nerdy teen boy, Karen Gillan gets to play a shy teen girl, Jack Black gets to play a cheerleader, and Kevin Hart gets to play… well, Kevin Hart.
The only way for these four players to escape Jumanji and return to their lives is to defeat the game’s boss, Van Pelt, and put a magical gem in a jaguar statue. With a little help from one of the Jonas brothers, they just might pull it off. Along the way, however, there’s dance-fighting, a killer hippopotamus, and more penis jokes than you’d probably expect. Here’s a completely unofficial look at the pitch meeting for Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.
Turning Jumanji into a video game might have been a gimmick aimed at getting kids interested in the franchise again, but it’s one that paid off. Not only did Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle end up pleasing critics and audiences alike, the film also surpassed Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man to become Sony’s highest-grossing movie of all time, with a total take of $962 million worldwide (though Spider-Man: Far From Home came swinging back this year to reclaim the crown).
The recently-released sequel, Jumanji: The Next Level, looks set to be a similar box office hit, so it’s pretty safe to say that the kids are due another visit to Jumanji in the future. In the latest movie, Danny DeVito and Danny Glover join the cast and end up being sucked into the game as well, which means that we get to see Dwayne Johnson’s Danny DeVito impression, and Jack Black’s Danny Glover impression. That alone is probably worth the price of admission.
