Name: Jumanji: Open World
Director: Jake Kasdan

The great joke of the Jumanji reboots was never that Dwayne Johnson could hurl a man across a jungle. It was that, inside that impossible body, someone small and frightened was doing the hurling. The first trailer for Jumanji: Open World lets the game break loose of its console and spills the avatars into our own streets — and in doing so it arrives at the most revealing version of that joke the series has attempted.

For two films Johnson has played Dr. Smolder Bravestone as a magnificent shell with a nervous teenager at the controls. The comedy lived entirely in the gap: the granite silhouette of the action hero, and the panicking kid piloting it from somewhere behind the eyes. The trailer’s central conceit quietly removes that pilot. Freed from the game but with no players to steer them, the heroes are, as one character puts it, “stuck in demo mode.” What is left on screen is the avatar alone, running its loop.

This is, whether the studio intends it or not, the sharpest idea the franchise has ever handed itself. Demo mode is the condition a video-game character occupies when nobody is playing — the canned animation, the idle flex, the pose held for an audience that has walked away from the console. Watch the avatars move in stilted little cycles through a world that is suddenly, disconcertingly real, and you are watching a very precise metaphor for a certain kind of movie star: the persona that keeps flexing on schedule long after anyone is inside it directing the performance.

That is the person-story the trailer smuggles in. Johnson’s Bravestone is the rare role that runs against, rather than with, the Rock brand — the invincible frame played for insecurity, the hero used as the setup and never the punchline. Demo mode is the concept that either doubles down on that self-parody or abandons it. Let Bravestone glitch, stall, repeat his heroic idle while the plot needs a human being, and the gag deepens: an action figure who has forgotten he was ever animated by a scared child. Simply let him flex, and the finale is on autopilot in the most literal sense.

Director Jake Kasdan, returning for a third turn, has always built his comedy on mismatch — performers acting emphatically against type, the direction a machine for the wrong soul in the wrong body. Jack Black’s Professor Oberon carrying a teenage girl’s vanity; Kevin Hart’s zoologist sized down to Franklin Finbar’s exasperation; Karen Gillan’s Ruby Roundhouse weaponizing the very male gaze the avatar was designed to bait. Strip the humans out of that machine and the mismatch risks collapsing into mere spectacle — creatures and heroes loose in the real world, chaos without the ghost inside it. The whole bet of Open World is whether Kasdan can keep the ghost.

The ensemble suggests he wants to. Alongside Johnson, Black, Hart and Gillan, the trailer folds back Nick Jonas, Alex Wolff, Madison Iseman, Ser’Darius Blain, Danny DeVito and Rhys Darby, with newcomers filling out an installment that several read as the trilogy’s close — “The Final Countdown” blaring over the footage is not a subtle signal. Kasdan again shares screenplay credit with Jeff Pinkner and Scott Rosenberg, the pair who understood from the start that the franchise’s engine was character, not jungle.

Sony opens the film on Dec. 25, into one of the most crowded Christmas corridors in memory: it lands a week behind Dune: Part Three and Marvel’s Avengers: Doomsday, both arriving Dec. 18. The reboots have earned that confidence — Welcome to the Jungle and The Next Level together grossed more than $1.7 billion worldwide — but pedigree is not the question the trailer raises.

The question is smaller and stranger. A demo runs whether or not anyone is watching; that is what makes it a demo. The pleasure of these movies was always the person hiding inside the hero. If Open World can find him again in a body that no longer needs him, it has a joke worth the third telling. If it can’t, it will simply be Bravestone, flexing on Christmas morning, for no one.

Étiquettes: bandes-annonces, Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jake Kasdan, Jumanji: Open World