Director Jake Kasdan and the rest of the creative time behind Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle and its successful spinoff Jumanji: The Next Level are hard at work sketching out the broad strokes of the next movie. Obviously, the question on everyone’s minds is whether or not the main cast will be back. Well, I probably have some good news.
Jake Kasdan recently sat down for an interview with NME, and during it, he was asked whether the four main cast members (Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black and Karen Gillan) would be back for the next next level or whatever it’s going to be called. He didn’t exactly say yes, but it’s hard to interpret this answer as anything but a yes. Here’s a portion of his quote…
“The whole thing, to me, is built on the foundation of those people. The game cast are these brilliant movie stars, these iconic people.”
That feels like, at minimum, most, if not all, of the older actors will be at least asked back. As for the kids, there seems to be good news there too. Kasdan said it’s “hard to imagine” a Jumanji movie without lead actor Alex Wolff in it. He also referred to the rest of the younger actors (Madison Iseman, Ser’Darius Blain and Morgan Turner) as “brilliant” and said they’re not appreciated nearly enough. I don’t really get what the point of getting rid of them would be either since they fill a necessary function, and I’m not sure you’d really add anything new to the franchise by having different kids.
I absolutely love The Rock and company in these roles. They’re clearly the stars of the show, but at some point, the franchise is going to need some fresh blood. You can only go to the same well so many times. The Next Level did a great job of letting the cast members play different personalities, but I’m not sure new new personalities will be enough of a differentiator. I’d personally like to see a sequel to the game where the characters look slightly different, have new powers and ideally, there’s more available characters to play.
That would work some new celebrities into the mix. It would open up the larger Jumanji world, but it wouldn’t totally abandon the basic spirit of what has made the last two installments so successful. I think that’s the best way to keep continuity while remaining fresh, but since the creative team behind the movies has consistently surpassed my expectations, I’m gonna assume they’ll figure out an idea better than mine and go with that.
There’s no timetable yet on the next Jumanji movie, but if it follows the release pattern of the last two movies, it’ll come out in December of 2021.That could definitely happen at this point, but some of it will depend on when studios are able to get back to filming without restrictions. In addition, the current hiatus may cause issues with scheduling; so, for the time being, all we can do is cross our fingers and hope to see this sooner rather than later.
