Back in 2017,
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle released alongside
Star Wars: Episode VIII — The Last Jedi. Despite being a simple action-comedy,
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle managed to hold its own against a mainline
Star Wars movie — financially speaking.
This year,
Jumanji: The Next Level will be going up against
Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker — the former releasing on December 13th and the latter on the 19th. However, the film's producers are confident in their decision to once again release the comedy against a major
Star Wars film.
In a recent interview (via Gamefragger), Hiram Garcia and Matt Tolmach spoke about how the first film's success inspired them to go up against the behemoth of a franchise again — and they're once again confident that Jumanji will be able to pull through.
"You're going up against the monster and Star Wars," says Garcia. "You don't know if you're just going to get kind of lost in this tide away. And we started to realize all of a sudden that, 'You know, fans were really loving this.'"
"We do have something special here," Garcia continued. "A testament to Jake [Kasdan] and to the cast as well, where everyone loved the idea of doing another one. You just had to be right. Like Matt [Tolmach] was saying, it's like it has to be worthy of telling the story. It wasn't just going to be a quick grab of like, 'Oh, let's just do another sequel.' No, we created something special."
"It's good fun for them. It's good for us," Tolmach joked before Garcia continued in explaining why Jumanji: The Next Level is a perfect holiday movie.
You liked the holidays. The type of movies that people responded to are just big fun, wish fulfillment, and there's never a better time than during the holidays where it's that weird time where everyone's home, and it's kind of the viewing where you go with your whole family and always loved ourselves going to these kinds of movies and to be able to make a movie that we honestly feel a whole family, eight to 80 can say, 'Everyone, let's just go to the movies.' Everyone's going to have fun. Every age group are going to have something that they can lean into and ultimately leave. Just feeling better, having a good time. That's the cinema. We've always loved that. So to be able to have that opportunity, it's awesome.
In Jumanji: The Next Level, the gang is back but the game has changed. As they return to Jumanji to rescue one of their own, they discover that nothing is as they expect. The players will have to brave parts unknown and unexplored, from the arid deserts to the snowy mountains, in order to escape the world’s most dangerous game.
Jumanji: The Next Level is set to release in theatres on December 13th, 2019.