Game Changer

In 2017, JUMANJI: WELCOME TO THE GUNGLE proved it wasn’t a risky underdog when it held its own against Star Wars. As the videogame adventure returns for The Next Level, stars Dwayne Johnson, Karen Gillan and Jack Black plus director Jake Kasdan tell Total Film about rewriting the rules, Kevin Hart’s recovery, and facing Skywalker once again.

- Matt Maytum

The high level of expectation and pressure… that is a blessing that I’m happy to accept,” Dwayne Johnson tells Total Film. The artist formerly (and still occasionally) known as The Rock has just stepped out of a tasting meeting for his tequila brand (“I’ve actually been tasting a lot of tequila every day, so my days are pretty damn good!”), and is considering the position that sequel Jumanji: The Next Level finds itself in. “The alternative would have been the last Jumanji that we made – maybe it didn’t fare so well with audiences, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

The first film (well, technically second) Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle, was something of an underdog when it arrived in December 2017. It was a sequel rebooting a property that had been dormant for 22 years. Original star, Robin Williams, had sadly died. It belonged (in a sense) to the box-office poisonous subgenre of videogame movies. And if that didn’t seem foolhardy enough, it was going up against Star Wars: The Last Jedi, when most blockbusters were moving their release dates far, far away from the Lucasfilm behemoth.

“Absolutely [it was an underdog],” admits returning director Jake Kasdan. “No question. We were worried about it to the very end, whether it would be possible to get people to go to another movie at the moment [Star Wars] was coming out. It was something we were talking about a lot.” A cynic might have written it off as dead on arrival. “When I first heard that word came down from up high that [Sony Pictures chairman] Tom Rothman had decided that we were going to be a Christmas release, it was a mixed bag for me,” Jack Black tells