The Lost Sequel to Jumanji: White House Chaos and Robin Williams’s Decline

Did you know that a sequel to Jumanji had been considered? The action took place at the White House and involved the President of the United States. As for Robin Williams, he simply declined the proposal.

When was this supposed to come out?

On June 3, 1999, Variety announced that the sequel to Jumanji had found its director and that the target release date was Christmas 2000, the same as that which had succeeded in the first film, released on December 15, 1995 in the United States.

But what was this sequel supposed to tell, written by one of the screenwriters of the first film, Jonathan Hensleigh, and which we ultimately never saw?

And what happened to the actor who played Peter in the first film?

What did it say?

Sony

At the end of Jumanji, the game ends up stranded on the beach. The idea was that he would have drifted to Normandy (yes, across the entire Atlantic, then the English Channel) where he would have ended up in an antique dealer’s shop. There, the American President, visiting to commemorate the 1944 Landings, bought the game for pure nostalgic effect to offer it to his family.

Jumanji 2 would therefore have thrown the President of the United States into the game and, as screenwriter Chris Van Allsburg (author of the book Jumanji) tells SYFY: “All the disasters that the game can generate are triggered in the White House and in the halls of Congress. I think there was a gorilla climbing the Washington Monument in homage to King Kong.”

Sony We can imagine the animals in the White House

Above all, what interests the director and the producers is to be able to go further visually than the first film. How ? By inventing new animals. Two beasts were accidentally cut in half by a plane or helicopter and, Van Allsburg reveals, “They became able to reassemble themselves into different parts of a [nouvel] animal”.

Who was it with?

Ken Ralston was to direct the film. Having started at George Lucas at ILM, he was at the time the president of Imageworks, Sony Pictures’ special effects company. And Sony Pictures had the rights to Jumanji. Neither one nor two, Ralston was offered to direct his first feature film with Jumanji 2, which will rely heavily on its visual effects.

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No members of the original cast were supposed to return since the film focused on a new family (that of the President of the United States), and the project was not far enough along to have to worry about a star to carry this new feature film. We had just heard about Steve Buscemi in the role of the treacherous vice-president taking over the White House while the President plays in the universe of Jumanji.

Why didn’t it happen?

In 1999, while the film was being prepared, Star Wars – The Phantom Menace was released in theaters, shot massively on a green screen, opening up the field of visual possibilities to an entire generation fed up with the advancement of digital special effects in cinema. It is also a film relying massively – like its 80s predecessors – on merchandising.

Sony Hide!

Suffice to say that new animals had to appear in Jumanji 2 to exploit the new technologies available, but also – and above all? – make it possible to sell toys never seen elsewhere, based on hybrid animals. This was also confirmed at the time by Ewa Martinoff, vice-president of the marketing department for Sony derivative products:

The original had difficulty being identified because the animals were traditional and many companies sell animals like giraffes and elephants. The new characters [de Jumanji 2] have unique properties.

But in the early 2000s, when the film was to be shot at the end of 1999, future director Ken Ralston left the project. The studio let it rest and returned to the attack in 2002 by announcing a new sequel with a new pitch and Robin Williams returning, directed by Dennis Dugan (Devil, Big Daddy).

In the end, Chris Van Allsburg, author of the book and co-writer of the first film, proposed another idea:

Sony

Robin Williams

I said to myself: ‘what if inside the game Jumanji, there was a space adventure on the back of the board? Instead of playing Jumanji, a game in which the jungle comes to your house, there is also a space adventure game in which your house goes into space?’

And this is how Zathura: A Space Adventure was born, released in February 2006 under the leadership of Jon Favreau, who killed the idea of ​​a Jumanji 2 before Dwayne Johnson took it up again, adapts to the world of video games, and releases Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle in 2017.

2024-03-12 13:35:04
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