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Let’s face it, the mid-December box office will be dominated by Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part Three, but for those seeking fun holiday family fare, Jumanji: Open World opens the very next week on Christmas Day. Sony Pictures just released a new trailer for director Jake Kasdan’s sequel to his 2019 hit, Jumanji: The Next Level, teasing the usual wacky hijinks with a twist that calls back to the original 1995 film. As previously reported, Kasdan gave the franchise a welcome major overhaul with the release of 2017’s Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, updating the original board game into a vintage video game and giving us a hugely entertaining action-adventure. Welcome to the Jungle racked up over $960 million at the global box office and spawned the equally successful 2019 sequel Jumanji: The Next Level. A third film was always in the cards: The Next Level featured a tantalizing mid-credits scene in which a heater repairman (Lamorne Morris) visits Spencer Gilpin’s (Alex Wolff’s) house, sees the broken video game console, and inadvertently triggers the game. The COVID-19 pandemic paused the third film’s development, but things picked up again in 2024, and here we are. Per the official synopsis: This Christmas, Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, and Karen Gillan are reunited in Jumanji: Open World, the hilarious final installment of the globally beloved action-adventure trilogy. Our heroes have escaped the perilous jungles of Jumanji before, but this time Jumanji breaks free of its console, unleashing its chaos into our world. Star Dwayne Johnson—who plays in-game avatar Dr. Xander “Smolder” Bravestone—let slip in 2019 that The Next Level‘s in-game villain, Jurgen the Brutal (Rory McCann), was actually the avatar of another unknown real-world player.
document fetched 2026-10-29 03:02 · canonical https://arstechnica.com/culture/2026/10/buckle-up-for-more-body-swapping-hijinks-in-jumanji-open-world-trailer