Jumanji-licensed theme park rides are coming to horrify children everywhere
Sony Pictures has signed a deal to license children deathtrap franchise Jumanji to Merlin Entertainments
The Jumanji movies, when you strip away all the Robins Williams and video game tropes and general sense of adventurous fun, are pretty much all about magically constructed deathtraps for children. Sure, you could argue that the forces animating the haunted board game/video games in the three Jumanji films (and the original book) are secretly working to bring about emotional growth in their victims. But they also seemed pretty cool with shooting a bunch of poisonous plant spikes into Kirsten Dunst’s neck, so…
Now you, too, can fantasize about the fun of watching your children be murdered by lions while David Alan Grier can only look on, helpless, as Sony Pictures has successfully signed a deal to license Jumanji-based theme park rides to Merlin Entertainments.
British-based Merlin is a bit of an also-ran in the United States, where it mostly just operates various Legolands and Madame Tussauds. But now, it can also be known for rides where you think all the time about how the Nick Jonas character in Welcome To The Jungle instantly dies any time a mosquito bites him, and no, you have issues with the fragility of your own existence, okay?
The Jumanji rides will apparently start operating at many of Merlin’s locations across the globe, with the first—Jumanji: The Adventure—scheduled to begin running in Italy next month. No word on when the timetable might extend to the United States, or whether the rides will be incorporated into the general Legoland framework. (Honestly, a whole Jumanji-themed theme park would be pretty kickass, once you got past the horrible murderousness of it all.)
Meanwhile, there’s no word from Sony of late about what the film franchise proper might be up to; 2019 sequel The Next Level didn’t quite hit the box office highs of Welcome To The Jungle, which nearly cracked the billion-dollar mark. But it didn’t do Zathura numbers either, suggesting that another installment might roll down the franchise pipeline at some point.