Disney gets back in line for another ride on the Jungle Cruise

Congratulations to Dwayne Johnson, who now has another film franchise to carry on his muscly back, and to Emily Blunt, who is now continuing her tentative toe-dipping into the lucrative world of film franchises (until they make Another Girl On The Train or she signs on to play Sue Storm, she really just has Gnomeo & Juliet and A Quiet Place). According to Variety, Disney has taken out its new Genie pass and used it to get right back in line for Jungle Cruise, which is to say that a sequel to Blunt and Johnson’s recent adventure/romance movie is getting a sequel.

Variety says director Jaume Collet-Serra is “expected to return,” along with Johnson and Blunt, but that’s pretty much the only concrete information we have about the sequel (and it’s not even especially concrete, at that). The first Jungle Cruise was the last, and maybe the last, movie to debut simultaneously in theaters and on Disney+’s Premier Access tier, which costs $30 on top of an existing Disney+ subscription, and the film has done medium-good financially since coming out a month ago. It broke $100 million in the U.S., which has been relatively rare this year (compared to pre-pandemic), and it supposedly made $30 million from that Disney+ deal. Black Widow also supposedly did relatively well with that same deal, but we all know how that turned out for Disney.

This is completely baseless speculation, but given the Scarlett Johansson suit and the fact that she was out of the Marvel business anyway after that movie, perhaps Disney decided to quickly jump on the Jungle Cruise sequel to assuage any similar unrest from its stars. Sort of a, “We’re happy with how the movie did and we want you to be happy as well!” thing. Either way, there’s a Jungle Cruise sequel.