Jumanji is back in game play mode as Sony’s latest sequel of its hit franchise heads toward a November start of production in Los Angeles.
Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black and Karen Gillan are returning to star in the feature, which will once again be directed by Jake Kasdan.
One new face in the feature will be Brittany O’Grady, who may be best known for co-starring in the first season of Mike White’s HBO series, The White Lotus.
Burn Gorman, who has appeared in movies such as Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, is another new face on the roll call.
Matt Tolmach, Johnson, Dany Garcia, Hiram Garcia and Kasdan are producing the project, which has been in development under the radar until getting a greenlight and then hitting sprint mode to production.
Plot details are being kept in the console, but it is known that Jeff Pinkner and Scott Rosenberg wrote the script.
Jumanji is ostensibly based on the 1981 picture book of the same name by Chris Van Allsburg and that featured an enchanted board game come to life. That was the general basis of Sony’s beloved 1995 movie starring Robin Williams.
Jumanji got a modern all-star update in 2017 with Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, with the board game now being a video game plus the trappings of body-switching movie: four teens find themselves trapped in the game while inhabiting adult-like avatars (Johnson, Hart, Black, Gillan). That movie grossed $962.5 million worldwide, launching a veritable franchise. A sequel, titled Jumanji: The Next Level, was released in 2019 and grossed $800 million globally.
Depending on your point of view, this new installment can be seen as the fourth entry in the series, as the 2017 movie did connect to the Williams story, or the third entry of the Johnson & co. relaunch.
Alex Wolff, Madison Iseman, Ser’Darius Blaine, and Morgan Turner, who played the “IRL” characters in the previous movies, are expected to return as is Awkwafina, who appeared in the 2019 entry.
Character details for O’Grady and Gorman were not revealed.
On top of her White Lotus breakout, O’Grady will be seen as part of the ensemble cast of Kathryn Bigelow’s buzzy new dramatic feature, A House of Dynamite, which debuts on Netflix Oct. 24.
She was one of the stars of It’s What’s Inside on Netflix, which debuted last fall after selling to Netflix as the largest Sundance sale of the year, and appeared opposite Daisy Ridley in Sometimes I Think About Dying and opposite Kevin Bacon in this year’s Tribeca selection The Best You Can.
O’Grady, who also starred opposite Christoph Waltz in Amazon’s stylish thriller series The Consultant, is repped by CAA and Suskin/Karshan Management.
Gorman is repped by Verve and Management 360.
