Best Christmas present ever: A ‘Jumanji’ reboot is coming

We already know what we’re going to find underneath the tree come next Christmas:  A brand new game of Jumanji. The 1995 movie that more than likely terrified you just a little bit as a kid is coming back to the big screen in a brand new reboot. Maybe as an adult everything won’t be as frightening when the board game comes to life?

Sony just announced their upcoming movie slate for the next two years, and among those titles is the Jumanji remake. Or, as it’s being called on it’s IMDB page, “a re-imagining” of the original film. The re-imagining has been in development for almost three years now, but little information has been known about it.

The Hollywood Reporter mentioned that Zach Helm (who wrote Strange than Fiction and Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium) is writing this new take, but then again that was three years ago. Doesn’t look like anything has changed on that front, but there still isn’t any director, let alone any stars, attached to the project. The original Jumanji starred the late Robin Williams as the adult-version of a young boy who gets trapped inside a magical board game called (you guessed it) Jumanji. The movie also featured Bonnie Hunt, as the childhood friend who started the game with Williams’ character, and a young Kirsten Dunst, as a child to inadvertently joins in on Williams and Hunt’s game with her brother.

If you can’t find your VHS of Jumanji to play in your VCR for a refresher, the OG movie was about a board game that literally comes to life and consumes its players. How so? Instead of humdrum game play like “lose a turn” Jumanji would be like, “there’s a swarm of mosquito that’s going to attack and you have to defeat them to advance,” or “earthquake!” And then an IRL a swarm of mosquito, and an earthquake, would happen, and the only way to make it stop is to finish the game. And to finish the game, of course, you had to live through all of that crazy stuff. It’s no wonder Bonnie Hunt’s character reacts in a panic when she’s asked to keep playing.

So what will this Jumanji re-imagining bring? Probably the same kind of terror that gave us board game-fueled nightmares back in ’95, along a little bit more CGI. We’ll be able to start this brand new game of Jumanji on December 25, 2016.

(Images via Sony and Giphy.)

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