“If we as an industry feel we must be shackled to franchises for name recognition sales, this seems like a good way for the creative to beat the system; just make something cool and randomly slap a franchise name onto it.”-Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw

Croshaw was referring to the video game industry, but this quote could just as easily apply to the film industry, and especially to the new Jumanji film, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. The new Jumanji is a total reboot in all but name. This movie could have easily been an unrelated, stand-alone film, and for the most part, functions that way aside from the iconography of the Jumanji universe and a few references and homages to the previous film (especially that of Robin William’s character, Alan Parrish). As it stands, however, Welcome to the Jungle is a humorous, big-budget adventure film with a light-hearted tone that stands in stark contrast to the original.

The original Jumanji was one of those films that was marketed as “family friendly” but scared and scarred many young children with its dark tone, terrifying sequences with strange and exotic flora and fauna, and life or death stakes resulting in excellent dramatic tension. It was an extremely popular movie, and grossed over $260 million worldwide, in the process becoming the tenth highest grossing film of 1995. Despite having a good ending, Hollywood never knows when to leave well enough alone and will reboot, reimagine, remake, and “re-will-it-make-us-money” any property with decent name recognition it can get its hands on. I’m honestly amazed that it took so long for this to happen to Jumanji. Welcome to the Jungle was stuck in production hell for over five years and it endured numerous changes and rewrites until we received the final product.