This second Jumanji: The Next Level trailer expands upon the sequel’s switcheroo hook a little bit more, offering more of essentially Kevin Hart “doing” a Danny Glover impression while Dwayne Johnson spends the film mimicking Danny DeVito. It’s a decent-enough gimmick for the sequel offering something different while expanding upon one of the pleasures of the previous film’s “humans inside a video game” plot.
Some of fun of the fun of the last film was how it used the fantasy element to allow its cast to play somewhat against type, so you had Jack Black as a teen girl, Karen Gillan as a mousy/shy wallflower, Hart as a muscular athlete and Johnson as a shy, skinny outcast. The Next Level isn’t rewriting the formula, but it is playing with it. Nonetheless, the film itself is the same core premise, watching fish-out-of-water “players” make their way through a video game adventure.
The locations are different, and some of the twists are… different (that horse reveal probably should have stayed out of the marketing), but the hope is that audiences will want to do another go-around with this specific cast in this specific franchise. There’s little reason to doubt them, as the last film was about as leggy as Avatar and earned $403 million domestic from a $36 million Fri-Sun debut.
It’s opening two weeks earlier, on December 13, and via a straight-up Fri-Sun weekend with no holiday boost until its second Mon-Thurs frame. The last film earned $71.9 million in its Wed-Mon debut, which is a plausible guestimate for this one’s Fri-Sun opening. This could be the kind of sequel that merely plays about as well as we all expected from the last one.
We can expect a “breakout sequel” performance on opening weekend, but after that it may have to settle for mere “terrific for December” legs as opposed to James Cameron-worthy legs. It opens before Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Cats, Little Women and Spies in Disguise. A $72 million debut weekend followed by legs like The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug or Rogue One (over/under 3.5x its opening) still gets this one to $252 million. It could be more frontloaded (think 3.3x, like I Am Legend and Sherlock Holmes) or it could be leggier still (think over/under 3.8x, like Tron: Legacy and The Force Awakens), which puts it between $238 million and $281 million domestic.
None of these results would qualify as “bad,” especially presuming that the budget wasn’t that much more than the last film’s $90 million price tag. Whether it takes a similar dip overseas is an open question, as we don’t know to what extent audiences outside of North America will care about The Rise of Skywalker and the whole “end of Star Wars” thing. But even a similar drop would still give Jumanji: The Next Level a $600 million global cume.
Of course, this could be a sequel that dips in North America but rises overseas. Think, offhand, Star Trek Into Darkness, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Avengers: Age of Ultron, etc. That feels unlikely because Welcome to the Jungle earned $560 million overseas last time out, but it’s not impossible.
Can Jumanji: The Next Level pull off the same miracle twice for Sony? Sony is doing fine, in that they just crossed $1 billion domestic for the year and have three major Oscar contenders in Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood, Little Women and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, but the relative failures of Men in Black: International and The Girl in the Spider’s Web means that Jumanji may be the exception to the rule when it comes to revamping their older franchises.
After all, a studio cannot thrive on Spider-Man alone, even if it’s consumers that deserve blame for ignoring the Black & Blue, Only the Brave and Roman Israel, Esq. When you don’t show up for All the Money in the World, you can’t blame Sony for hiring Jason Reitman to make a Ghostbusters sequel.
