Jumanji reboot gets a director

Despite endless shuffling, the long-gestating Jumanji reboot seems to be finally coming together: it’s just bagged a director in the form of Jake Kasdan, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

There’s just one little niggle: last year, Sony Pictures set a release date for the film for Christmas Day, 2016, and that doesn’t seem like it’s going to budge. That’s this year, in case you hadn’t noticed – which doesn’t give Kasdan an awful lot of time to prep, shoot, and post-produce the movie. Of course, great things can come from the focus filmmakers get when under pressure. We’re just not convinced that Kasdan is the particular man to accomplish that, thanks to his checkered back catalogue: he’s had past hits with the cult favourite Orange County and the weird and wonderful Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, but in recent times he’s been behind the awful, awful, awful movies Bad Teacher and the somehow even worse Sex Tape.

Also, we’re calling the new Jumanji a ‘reboot’ as opposed to a ‘remake,’ because this new version will be going back to the source book – not making a copy of the 1995 film starring Robin Williams. Will it be as zany and fun as that movie? Probably not – but good luck to Kasdan, who is getting on what is essentially a speeding train and commandeering the controls, before steering it away from catastrophically derailing and pulling it safely into the station.

If you can think of a more apt comparison, we’d like to hear it.