Jumanji

The new trailer for the ‘Jumanji’ film set to release later this year has finally arrived!  It’s certainly a different take on the original Jumanji idea as presented in the 1995 film.  Without further ado, take a look at it and let’s talk more about the trailer below.

So, an intriguing premise, as it seems the powers-that-be behind the film decided to try and update the concept a bit more a more modern era.  As Producer Matt Tolmach puts it in a recent interview:

“We always talk about [‘Welcome to the Jungle’] as another ‘Jumanji’ adventure. It is very much the spirit of ‘Jumanji,’ but with a different group of people and sort of a different idea. But the idea of the game that comes to life is the DNA there.”

Director Jake Kasdan was particularly keen on the idea of the “body-swapping” which allows two very different types of characters to essentially inhabit the same body:

“It allows this level of candor and examination because the characters are teenagers who are trying to figure out their own person, and in these new people, it complicates that mess.  But it also gives them the opportunity to take something from the experience.”

And what did the actors think about it?  Jack Black, whose in-game character Professor Shelly Oberon gets “inhabited” by teen girl Bethany (Madison Iseman), found it a bit outside the normal realm of acting work:

“There wasn’t exactly an Actors Studio Workshop approach to this for me! I knew what I thought was funny about it, and I knew what I could do. I guess I subconsciously used all of my memories from high school when I was there — all of my research of high school girls from the 1980s.”

The trailer seems intentionally released relatively late in the marketing game for ‘Jumanji,’ as we will only have about six months to wait to see the finished product in theaters!

‘Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle’ opens in American theaters on December 20, 2017.