How 'Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle' went from a punchline to one of Sony's biggest box-office hits ever
- The internet had a field day in 2015 when Sony officially announced it was making a sequel to its hit 1995 movie, "Jumanji."
- But the joke's on the internet critics, the movie - powered by Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart - earned close to $1 billion globally at the box office.
- Director Jake Kasdan explained to Business Insider how he pulled off one of the biggest surprise hit movies in recent memory.
Things did not start off well for the sequel to "Jumanji."
20 years after the 1995 hit movie - which starred Robin Williams as a man who, after decades of being trapped inside a magical board game, is finally released to complete it with two kids - Sony announced in 2015 that it was going to dust off the property and reboot it.
The internet was not happy.
"It was like, 'You're ruining my childhood!'" Jake Kasdan, director of "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle," recalled when Business Insider asked if he was aware of the backlash.
Following the Sony announcement, social media was flooded with negative reactions, the consensus being a "Jumanji" reboot would tarnish the original's legacy and this was just the latest example of Hollywood being completely out of new ideas:
And things didn't get any better for the movie when, after screenwriter Chris McKenna ("Spider-Man: Homecoming") was tasked with coming up with a new take on the movie, three more screenwriters came on board to give it a crack. The release date was also changed three times, eventually settling in December, the weekend after "Star Wars: The Last Jedi."
These are not good signs for a movie.
But in one of the most miraculous turnarounds for a movie in recent memory, "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle" didn't just hold its own against "Last Jedi" in December (consistently finishing in second place behind "Jedi" the rest of the year), it knocked the latest "Star Wars" movie off the top spot and went on an incredible three-week streak of topping the weekend domestic box office in January.
The movie went on to earn over $939 million worldwide, and over $400 million in North America - the second-best domestic performance ever for a Sony movie (just below the $403.7 million made by 2002's "Spider-Man"). All this came from just a $90 million budget.
And no one is more surprised by the movie's global success than Kasdan.
"I loved what this could be"
Known for R-rated comedies like "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story" and "Bad Teacher," Kasdan came out of nowhere to prove he could helm a PG-13 action-comedy with major stars like Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Karen Gillan, and Nick Jonas.
Kasdan signed on to direct a few months after Sony made the official announcement, despite being fully aware of the hatred for the idea by those on the internet.
"On some level I think there's a deserved skepticism about bringing back titles," Kasdan told Business Insider while promoting the Blu-ray/DVD release of the movie (available Tuesday). "Whether it's a sequel, reboot, relaunch, I think we've done so much of it that understandably the audience is kind of 'why does everything have to be like this?' But I loved what this could be."
The major adjustment done for the "Jumanji" sequel was shifting the board game element to feel more like the present gaming world.
At the end of the original "Jumanji," Alan and Sarah toss the game into a river. The sequel starts years later in 1996 with the game being found on a beach. The boy who is given it ignores the lame board game, so the game magically morphs into a more attractive video game, sucking him into the game. Then later, more kids are sucked in and become avatars played by Johnson, Hart, Black, and Gillan.
That element opened incredible possibilities for the sequel's story, as it not only could bring the Jumanji game itself to life, but could deliver all types of gaming aspects to the movie - from the characters having three game "lives" apiece, to the jokes about their avatar's strengths and weaknesses.
Kasdan said this was all pulled off not by one single screenwriter who finally figured out how to crack the story, but by collectively using all of them, like a TV writers' room.
"It wasn't like someone was dismissed and never heard from again"
Traditionally, on a movie, when a screenwriter has handed in his or her draft and been told that another scribe has been hired, that usually means the director, producers, or studio executives (or all the above) didn't like the previous screenwriter's work. But that wasn't the case on "Welcome to the Jungle."
"What made this project unusual was I continued to work with a lot of the writers," Kasdan said. "It wasn't like someone was dismissed and never heard from again. Chris McKenna came up with the idea and wrote it with Erik Sommers, and then Scott Rosenberg and Jeff Pinkner came on, and I did some work on it as well. I just liked their work so by the end it was this unique experience where they worked with me or each other. Everyone kept a foot in."
Though Kasdan thought they had made a worthy movie, he still had no idea how it would play going into test screenings. So before the screenings, he decided to play the movie for his kids.
"My kids are like seven and five, which is sort of younger than we ever thought about our audience, but they loved it," he said. "That made me think that the movie had a larger possible audience than I had fully realized while we made the movie. They connected so strongly to the fantasy of it, it got me excited."
And the rest is history. The movie made just under $1 billion globally at the box office and solidified the star status of The Rock and Kevin Hart. And Kasdan is still trying to take it all in.
"I've been doing this long enough to realize how extraordinary this is," he said. "It's kind of a dream."
But now it's back to the drawing board for a sequel. Kasdan, Rosenberg, and Pinkner are all coming back as well as the lead cast. But can a sequel that was praised for having its own identity from the original pull off a successful encore? Can the video game storyline be used again? Is it right to bring back the same cast?
"We're just starting to figure that out," Kasdan said. "The honest answer is you could do all different kinds of things and we're trying to figure out what feels like the most organic and fun way to continue this."
More on "Jumanji":
- How the new "Jumanji" sequel pays homage to Robin Williams' character
- The unique reason the director of box-office hit "Jumanji" says he doesn't want to direct a "Star Wars" movie
- The amount of money The Rock gets paid for a single movie is unheard of in today's movie business