Sony’s first trailer for Jumanji: Open World arrived Tuesday, revealing a fresh premise that shifts the action beyond the game itself and into reality. game doesn’t stay inside the console?
Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart, and Karen Gillan are back as the trilogy’s larger-than-life avatars, but this time nobody gets pulled into the jungle. Instead, Jumanji breaks out into the real world, and the four of them end up stranded there alongside it. The Hollywood Reporter confirmed the film opens in theaters Christmas Day, closing out director Jake Kasdan’s reboot trilogy after 2017’s “Welcome to the Jungle” and 2019’s “The Next Level.”
The trailer leans hard into the glitch. Cut loose from their console and without players controlling them, the avatars come across as stunted, malfunctioning versions of themselves trying to navigate ordinary life — The Wrap described it as the group stuck operating in “demo mode.” Alex Wolff, reprising his role as one of the original teenagers who first got sucked into the game back in 2017, puts it bluntly in the footage: “We have a problem. The trailer reveals that the characters are “video game characters, but they’re stuck in demo mode,” a line ComingSoon.net said best clarifies the movie’s central concept.
It’s a deliberate callback, too. The Wrap pointed out that this setup pulls the rebooted series back toward the spirit of the original 1995 “Jumanji,” the one where Robin Williams spent decades trapped inside a magical board game before finally breaking free into our world. Deadline’s coverage of the trailer notes it’s scored to Europe’s “The Final Countdown,” with ostriches, rhinos, and other loose Jumanji wildlife tearing through city streets right alongside the confused avatars.
Behind the four leads, Just Jared ran through the rest of the returning cast: Madison Iseman, Morgan Turner, and Ser’Darius Blain are all back as the grown-up versions of the original teens, joined again by Nick Jonas, Rhys Darby, and Danny DeVito. Brittany O’Grady, Burn Gorman, Lamorne Morris, and Marin Hinkle round out the new additions.
Kasdan is directing all three films in this version of the franchise, working this time from a script by Jeff Pinkner and Scott Rosenberg. He produces alongside Johnson, Matt Tolmach, Dany Garcia, and Hiram Garcia — a lineup that, per Hollywood Reporter, hasn’t changed much since the first film.
There’s a lot riding commercially on getting this send-off right. Variety’s numbers put “Welcome to the Jungle” at more than $950 million worldwide and “The Next Level” at another $801 million, meaning the rebooted trilogy has already cleared $1.7 billion combined before “Open World” even opens. Johnson, Hart, and Black gave fans an early taste of the film back in April, unveiling its title and a first look at CinemaCon — footage that, according to Deadline, opened on a completely different scene than anything in Tuesday’s trailer.
Collider’s framing of the release leaves little ambiguity about what Sony is selling here: this is being pitched as the last chapter, full stop, for Johnson’s version of the character. “Jumanji: Open World” hits theaters December 25.
