On April 7, 2024, a Saturday Night Live sketch starred host Kristen Wiig as a woman with a strange fear of board games. Specifically, she’s terrified of “getting Jumanjied” — being sucked into a board game. But her friend, played by Andrew Dismukes, takes issue with her premise. In Jumanji, only one guy gets sucked into Jumanji. The plot actually follows Jumanji coming out of Jumanji.
Another person at the party is confused because she thought that Jumanji was about a bunch of people getting sucked into a video game. But as is helpfully explained to her, that’s the new Jumanji, not the original. She may be vindicated, however, as the next chapter in this rebooted series will finally have Jumanji come out of Jumanji.
At CinemaCon, Sony closed out its presentation with an announcement about its third installment in the current Jumanji film series, which updates the original 1981 movie’s board game with a video game. Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart announced that this new movie will be called Jumanji: Open World.
A trailer shown to the room depicted our teenage protagonist (Alex Wolff) as he realizes the avatars from the Jumanji game have actually been brought into the real world. But instead of being played by real-world players, these characters are stuck on “demo mode,” meaning they’re different from how we’ve seen them before; Johnson’s character, Dr. Bravestone, for example, is speaking in a Spanish accent.
Hart noted in the presentation that the “game rules” of Jumanji don’t always apply in Open World, and that we’ll actually see three different versions of these avatars throughout the movie. Unfortunately for the Jumanji pedants in the fandom, the story won’t entirely follow Jumanji coming out of Jumanji, as the series’ original players will enter the game once again. But there will still be references to the original film, including an extended tribute to original star Robin Williams.
Regardless of how much of this movie is spent exploring the outside world, it’s still a good change for the franchise. The world of Jumanji can only sustain Ready Player One-esque adventures for so long before it gets repetitive, and one of the biggest joys of the original movie is watching lions and rhinos and big-game hunters roam our modern world. Updating that for a 2026 release could be one of Open World’s most interesting moves, even if it leaves real-life board game players even more confused.
