Release Date: 12/15/1995
First Weekend At Number One: 12/15/1995
Weeks at Number One: 1
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here.
Here’s a fun fact: did you know it’s good for kids to get scared? Studies have shown that when children face frights in safe environments (such as a haunted house or on the TV), it aids in the development of key parts of their psyche. Not only does it better allow them to understand what their body feels like during a fear response, but it gives them the self-confidence to know they can handle stressful situations.
This isn’t to say you should be constantly exposing your own children to dangerous situations, of course. As sociologist Margee Kerr explains it:
When we know that we're safe—when we know that we can leave a haunted house or turn off a movie, when there's that understanding that you are actually maintaining agency, it has a huge impact on how we manage stress—namely, we manage much better
Thinking back to my own childhood experiences with fear though, this sounds like it could be a tough sell to some kids, especially young ones. I was not a super brave kid, often frightened by just the commercials for intense movies I’d see on TV; a Seed of Chucky ad freaked me out so bad when I was 9 that it altered my psyche around horror movies for about a decade. I didn’t enjoy roller coasters that went upside down, I didn’t care for the dark at all, and basically the scariest content I enjoyed consuming were old reruns of Scooby-Doo (and even then those gave me nightmares from time to time).
So how do you Trojan Horse important psychological development to a kid like me? Easy: you lie to them and tell them it’s time to watch a fun adventure movie starring Robin Williams.
Jumanji is a family adventure film based on the children’s book of the same name by Chris Van Allsburg. The story follows the chaos of a magic board game (the titular Jumanji) bringing dangerous jungle life and events to a small New England town. Despite only sitting on top of the box office for a single weekend, the movie maintains an iconic legacy for the people who grew up watching it on home video or as a TV rerun.
This was probably only my second time sitting down and watching the movie front to back in my entire life, but if I add up all the segments of it I’ve seen just from catching some it on TV as a kid, my total view count for Jumanji might be in the double digits at this point. It seemed like the movie was always being shown on the network movie channels when I was younger, so even though I never had it on VHS or DVD, I realized while watching it again for this column that I could still easily recall huge portions of it.
Though I knew the movie decently well, I was wholly unfamiliar with the story behind Jumanji, both in that I didn’t know it was based on a book and that I had never looked into the production of the movie. Chris Van Allsburg was a fairly prolific writer and illustrator of kids books from the ‘80s through the 2010s, also writing The Polar Express and Zathura. As a young man, he graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with an MFA in Sculpture. You wouldn’t think this would prepare him for the world of books for kids, but flipping through the pages of Jumaji, you can see him using the strong sense of posing and detail he developed while studying sculpture in all of the dynamic illustrations in the book.
The story in the 1981 book matches the movie in only the basics: Judy and Peter are siblings who are bored while home alone, but they find a mysterious board game called Jumanji and start playing it. As they play, their home becomes more and more like jungle-like, with snakes, lions, monsoons, and even the threat of volcanic eruption tearing apart the house. They survive the game by reaching the end and get rid of it before their parents get home, happy to return to the boring normalcy of life before the cursed game.
By the way, according to Van Allsburg, “Jumanji” doesn’t mean anything. At some point a misquote of him saying it was a Swahili word for “many effects” entered the public record, but the author clarified things in a 2023 interview with Syfy:
I was looking for something slightly exotic and something that evoked the idea of the jungle. I probably got to the J-U based on my interest of phonetically connecting it to the word 'jungle.' I'm not sure where M-A-N-J-I came from, but it was a made up word. I'm not sure it means anything. Back when I wrote it, it was impossible to put a word like 'Jumanji' into Google and see if it meant something in another language. It may, I don't even know. I don't think I've done it yet.
Jumanji the book was a major hit, winning the Caldecott Medal and selling millions of copies in the decades since its release. Despite this immediate success, an adaptation was slow to come. At some point in the early ‘90s though, Van Allsburg met with Peter Guber, head of Sony’s film division, near the author’s home in Rhode Island to talk about making Jumanji happen as a movie. Van Allsburg agreed to option the rights, and Sony began the process of making the movie via their subsidiary, Tristar Studios.
Tristar ran into problems right away. Though they commissioned multiple screenplays, none of them were deemed good enough. Jumanji was nearly dead in the crocodile infested water before it even had a chance to start. Inspired by the prospect of seeing his project brought to the big screen, Van Allsburg himself submitted a screenplay for the adaptation despite never having written a script before. Though I wasn’t able to find any trace of the Van Allsburg script online, whatever was in it was good enough to land the movie a director.
By the time Joe Johnston came onboard to helm Jumanji, the director held a mixed bag of a filmography. Starting out as an effects guy at Lucasarts back in the early ‘80s (he’s actually credited with designing Boba Fett for The Empire Strikes Back [5/5]), Johnston transitioned to directing effects-heavy family adventure films in the latter part of that decade.
This phase of his career started with aplomb, as Johnston was the director behind the hit Honey, I Shrunk The Kids for Disney in 1989. Though his directorial debut was successful enough to spawn two sequels and a TV show, Johnston’s ‘90s weren’t as successful right away. In 1991, Disney tapped the director to make The Rocketeer, a comic book adaptation and period piece that tried to tap into the same fun nostalgia for the 1930s that had made Indiana Jones such a big hit (Disney would later say “To Hell with it” and buy that franchise instead).
The Rocketeer is a decent time, but I wouldn’t say it’s an essential watch. Superhero movies at the time and in the years since have far outstripped it in terms of quality, and star Billy Campbell is no Harrison Ford. It has some charm in the aesthetic though. I imagine I probably would have liked it more had I seen it as a kid. Watching it as an adult I can only give it a 3/5 , and a lot of that is based on Timothy Dalton’s performance in it as the villain.
The Rocketeer bombed at the box office despite strong reviews, and Johnston’s follow-up, 1994’s The Pagemaster, didn’t even have the benefit of a good critical response before also disappointing commercially. Still, the man knew how to put together effects-heavy family adventure films with some competency, so he was the right man for the Jumanji job. Much more important, though, would be the main man in front of the camera.
Tristar had one production note for Johnston and his team as they started casting: if they couldn’t get Robin Williams as the lead, they couldn’t make the movie. Williams was one of hottest comedic actors of the decade to that point, with big hits like Aladdin and Mrs. Doubtfire under his belt already [both are a 3.5/5 from me].
Williams’s appearance in the lead role would go a long way to getting people to turn out for Jumanji, but Johnston had a problem. The same Van Allsburg-penned script that had convinced him to direct was now the reason Williams declined the offer to lead. In a self-described mania, Johnston, and credited screenwriters Jonathan Hensleigh, Greg Taylor, and Jim Strain crunched to flip the script around, and ended up changing so much that Van Allsburg only got a “Story By” credit.
Whatever was new about the updated script convinced Williams to join the cast. Bonnie Hunt, David Alan Grier (another alum of In Living Color like Jim Carrey), and Jonathan Hyde rounded out the rest of the main adult cast. Open auditions were held for the role of Judy, the older of the two young siblings in the film, and although a young Scarlet Johannson was one of the many who tried out, Kirsten Dunst walked away with the job. Despite her young age, she was no stranger to Hollywood productions at this point. Just the year before, she had worked with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt on the Ann Rice adaptation Interview with a Vampire.
The cast and crew of the movie spoke to the New York Times for an oral history of the movie in 2017 where they admitted to an honestly awkward early part of the shoot. Johnston was a stickler for sticking to the script, but manic comedic genius Robin Williams obviously wanted room to improv. Additionally, the director clashed with Bonnie Hunt over not understanding the performance she brought to the character. I guess he didn’t understand why a woman who was traumatized as a child by a magical board game wouldn’t just be a normal person.
Thankfully, compromises were found: Williams was allowed improv takes after he delivered scripted lines, and Johnston and Hunt were able to see eye-to-eye on the latter’s interpretation of the character. After these early foibles, it seems the rest of shooting went fairly smoothly, with Williams keeping everyone entertained on set between takes. There’s a real sense of sadness in that oral history as everyone reflects on his loss, still recent at the time. Adam Hann-Byrd, who played the child version of Williams’s character in the movie ends the piece sadly:
I was totally devastated when Robin died. He really did care about everyone around him. There was only one Robin Williams.
And that is the goddamn truth, because Robin Williams carries this whole movie on his back. The role of Alan Parrish calls for both crazed levity and grim seriousness, and there was absolutely no one else who could have done both to such effect. Jim Carrey may have been able to play the fun stuff a little goofier, Tom Hanks maybe could have added some more gravity to the drama, but only Robin Williams could have performed both elements of the role to such a high level.
The scene where we’re introduced to Williams is a perfect encapsulation of this. Alan Parrish emerges from the game Jumanji after 26 years spent in the deepest jungle, and the actor smashes both sides of the emotional metronome. He whoops and hollers with great relief, but at the same time calling out for the parents that we know aren’t there. It’s a legitimately emotional scene to watch as he realizes how much time has passed and how much has changed.
To be fair to everyone else in the movie, I don’t think there’s a bad performance to be found. Bonnie Hunt brings a fun, somewhat manic energy as Sarah, the grown up version of the girl who saw Alan sucked into Jumanji. Kirsten Dunst is fun and an obvious future star, and David Alan Grier, playing a beleaguered small town cop, has a few moments where he gets to express some funny reactions to the madness around him. I really love the choice to use Jonathan Hyde in dual roles as both young Alan’s dad and the hunter who chases adult Alan through the chaos of the game, Van Pelt. I can’t imagine many actors get the opportunity to play an evil Victorian big game hunter, but Hyde accomplishes it with equal parts fun and menace.
This dual casting of Hyde ties into the big thematic change between the movie and the original book. Whereas the latter had the simple message of “Boredom is usually preferable to danger,” the former focuses more on our relationships to fear. As a child, Alan is afraid of bullies and his overbearing father before he’s sucked into the jungles via a bad roll of the dice. As an adult, he can competently handle most of the dangers that emerge from Jumanji, but he still handles most of the serious threats (such as Van Pelt and the prospect of reuniting with Sarah) by running away from them. The message by the end, though simple, is an effective statement on facing your fears instead of constantly fleeing them.
This is a good lesson for the movie to lean on, because as much as the cast tried to deny it ahead of time in the press, Jumanji is damn close to being a straight up horror movie at times. The structure of the first act especially has the cadence of any scary supernatural film: a cold open that establishes the frightening stakes of the central evil, lingering shots of characters slowly looking around abandoned rooms as the tension builds, jump scares that are both innocuous fakeouts and actual threats, the whole deal.
It isn’t just the jump scares though. The mortal peril that these characters (half of whom are children) find themselves in is deadly serious and taps into a wide range of fears the audience may bring into the movie. Mosquitos, disease, bats, drowning, spiders, guns, being eaten alive, all are represented as real threats in the movie. And that’s not saying anything of the phobias this movie probably created. The most affecting scare for young Will was when Peter is nearly eaten alive by a horrifying carnivorous plant that constantly unfolds and expands its shocking design. New fear unlocked!
After a scene where a raucous stampede tears the house apart, Jumanji becomes more the fun adventure it was sold as in the press. But even once the movie has its characters building Home Alone [4.5/5] traps in a discount store to outwit Van Pelt, it still has some scares in the third act. Hope you don’t mind giant spiders, because holy shit there are a lot of them in the tail end of this movie.
Is Jumanji too scary for kids? Maybe for the really little ones. But as someone who probably first saw this movie when he was seven or eight, I think the fun of the movie balances out the scares on average. Before I watched it again recently, what stuck in my mind from the movie was the fun performance of Robin Williams, not any of the freakier effects shots or scenes of fright.
And I think my experience is reflected in the really positive legacy this movie has for the people who grew up watching it. It’s got high audience ratings on Letterboxd, IMDB, and Rotten Tomatoes all these years later. It’s anecdotal on my part, but a friend recently watched this movie with his nieces and nephews and confirmed that it still absolutely crushes with Gen Alpha.
I was a little surprised by that honestly, because we need to talk about the special effects of Jumanji.
I think it’s fair to say that the general consensus when it comes to how effects age is that CGI will always age faster while quality practical effects will likely stand the test of time. The quintessential example of this is Jurassic Park [3.5/5].
The CG of that movie isn’t the best from scene to scene, but it was revolutionary for the time in its ability to depict animals. The use of animatronics and puppetry, though, remains outstanding to watch. The shots of the tyrannosaurus rex in the dark rain that are CG look pretty good. The ones that switch over to physical effects will make you think they somehow cloned an actual T-Rex and taught it how to act.
The CGI for Jumanji was handled by Johnston’s old employer, Industrial Light and Magic. On their website, ILM makes the explicit connection between this movie and Jurassic Park, declaring that Jumanji was greenlit after their success in animating full dinosaurs with computer graphics. In addition, they implemented brand new rendering tech to aid in depictions of furry animals like monkeys.
Last week, I wrote about how Toy Story used strong lighting and colorwork to cover for the primitive rendering at the time. The effects team behind Jumanji do no such obfuscation. The digital effects in this movie have not aged well at all. Those monkeys that necessitated the new rendering tech are shown close up in full daylight and look way worse than the original Planet of the Apes costumes.
It isn’t just the monkeys either. The CG depictions of the lion, growing vines, giant mosquitos, and even torrent of water look more dated than almost any other computer effect I have ever seen. Tin Toy might honestly have held up better than some of these effects.
I wish I could tell you that the practical effects at least still look good, but I don’t think they fare much better than the CGI. The puppetry looks best when the movie uses it to depict something somewhat obfuscated (like the crocodiles in the water or the shot of the lion in the shadows) or a totally fictional design (that carnivorous plant that spooked me as a kid is still the best effect in the movie). Too often though, the movie shows these puppets close up and in full lighting, and they look really rough for it.
There are a few scenes that attempt to fuse practical and digital effects, and by their powers combined, these moments have actually aged pretty well. For example, a digital swarm of bats in the beginning of the movie is made more visceral with the brief appearance of a realistic bat puppet on a character’s shoulder. A giant mosquito attack later is more believable because of the physical damage done to the car the characters are hiding in.
The best example of this is the start of the stampede sequence. The effects team used a green-screened battering ram and small explosives to sell the destructive force of the countless rhinos, elephants, wildebeests, and more that rush through the Parrish Mansion, which were then added in post afterwards.
Movies that rely so heavily on special effects are often tough to go back and watch. Usually, if the effect isn’t just “big explosion,” the visuals age so badly that it becomes difficult to judge the movie without taking those dated special effects into consideration. I wish I could say Jumanji escapes that fate, but watching it now without being distracted by those effects is an impossible task. I watched the movie with my wife next to me while taking notes for the column and we both kept remarking on how bad a lot of the movie looked now.
That’s a shame, too, because overall Jumanji is a fun, thrilling time. The story and characters are a bit thinly sketched, but the whole movie ends up being greater than the sum of its parts because its set pieces are paced remarkably well. The movie never goes too long without something thrilling emerging from the gameboard, the consequences of which the protagonists always have to handle right away.
Critics at the time were concerned with the movie being too scary for kids, leading to the movie getting a surprisingly mixed response in its reviews. But when it comes to family movies like these, I’ve found that critics’ reviews aren’t super important unless they’re overwhelmingly negative. After all, kids don’t get that many movies in theaters that they can watch in a year, so when a big one comes out, it’s gonna do decent business at least.
And Jumanji did biiiiig business. It was only number one for one weekend, but it stayed around the multiplex as a strong box office presence for months. Its first theatrical run ended the following April after the movie had pulled in over $100 million. Add in the massive overseas pull of $162 million and you have a movie that pulled in nearly a quarter billion dollars on a $65 million budget.
Plus after that, the movie had a long second life on TV and home media, staying relevant to a whole generation of millennial and Gen Z kids who could usually count on it being an entertaining thrill-ride to put on the tube. Physical copies of the movie remained a big seller through the 2010s, so the timing lined up perfectly with a pair of sequels that we’ll get to eventually in this column.
I think the long-term success of Jumanji proves that not only is it okay for kids to be scared sometimes, but that they can enjoy the excitement of safe scares as much as adults can. The non-scary parts of the movie are fun and funny, carried by the always entertaining Robin Williams. They act as a reward for getting through the intense parts, and in the end, you’re rewarded with the lesson that you were right to persevere through the parts you found scary. After all, that’s what our characters had to do too, and they all turned out fine.
A lot of movies have been compared to the experience of riding a roller coaster, but I don’t think many capture the combined thrills and fun of a really great one like Jumanji does. Even if most of the effects haven’t held up, the movie has this timeless quality that’s appealing regardless of when you first watch it. After all, every kid knows what jungle animals and boardgames are, so on a conceptual level it’s very easy to grasp.
For the record, Chris Van Allsburg really liked the adaptation of his book, even if he didn’t get the screenplay credit in the end. Sony were also thrilled by the box office return, and went to the author to pitch ideas for a sequel right away. The one they were going to go with involved the game ending up at the White House, and Van Allsburg hated it. He was so against the concept that it inspired him to write the book Zathura, the story of a board game that takes you to space instead of the jungle.
Sony jumped to adapt that new book instead, even though it was just a spiritual sequel to their big hit instead of a direct one. 2005’s Zathura: A Space Adventure followed basically the same formula as Jumanji but used retro-futuristic visions of science fiction instead of Victorian ideas of deepest darkest Africa as its guiding aesthetic. Despite being helmed by Jon Favreau and starring Kristin Stewart and a VERY young Josh Hutcherson, the movie was a financial bomb and hasn’t had close to the cultural staying power as Jumanji.
I’ve actually seen Zathura and I don’t remember a thing about it [which I guess makes it a 2/5?]. Maybe that speaks to a lack of emotional spikes the sort of which Jumanji is full of.
I’ve also seen the other extremely mid Chris Van Allsburg adaptation from the mid-2000s, Robert Zemeckis’s version of The Polar Express, and I remember how I feel about that one. It’s an ugly, over-complication of a beautiful children’s book featuring the most baffling Tom Hanks performances to date. I’m glad it was a financial disappointment at the box office, because God forbid I ever have to watch it again [1/5].
When kids get scared, it makes an impression on them. In a world where kids can go through truly terrible things though, it’s something of a privilege to have our first experiences with fear in a safe environment. Jumanji is a fun movie overall, but it serves an important purpose in providing such an environment. Years later, people still share their experiences of being freaked out by the movie on sites like Reddit. The intensity of some of its scenes may have kept it from staying at the top of the Box Office for long, but the movie has sustained a long legacy because of it. We’ll be visiting the world of Jumanji again someday.
Rating: 3.5/5
What Else Was at the Theater?
Releasing the same day as Jumanji, Sydney Pollack’s remake of Sabrina is a frankly boring romantic comedy based on the absurd premise that anyone would need to be convinced into finding Harrison Ford more attractive than Greg Kinnear. The movie peaked at #5 that first weekend and ended up making $88 million on $50 million budget. Meh.
2.5/5