I've got a complicated relationship with movie licensed games, and I bet a lot of you reading this do too. We grew up in an era where slapping a movie logo on a cartridge meant an almost guaranteed stinker. So when Sony dropped the trailer for Jumanji: Open World this week, showing Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, and Kevin Hart back in their video game avatar forms, my first reaction was cautious optimism mixed with nostalgia.

Director Jake Kasdan is back to close out the trilogy, and the [trailer over at MSN](https://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/news/jumanji-open-world-trailer-see-dwayne-johnson-jack-black-kevin-hart/ar-AA28V8jo) makes one thing clear right away: this is leaning hard into the video game framing that made the 2017 and 2019 entries work. NPCs with looping dialogue trees, quest markers, environmental hazards that feel straight out of a platformer. Characters trapped inside a game world has always been my thing, going all the way back to how blown away I was by the .hack series on PS2. That game-within-a-game narrative felt genuinely ahead of its time.

What's interesting about Open World from a gaming perspective is how the film is borrowing mechanics language that didn't exist when the original 1995 Jumanji hit theaters. Open world design, skill trees, co-op party dynamics, all the DNA of modern AAA game structure is right there on screen. The original film was built on board game logic. Roll, move, survive the consequence. These new films operate on video game logic, and watching that language evolve across three movies has been genuinely fascinating, whether the films themselves are your thing or not.

The cast chemistry is the anchor, obviously. Johnson, Black, and Hart have their routine dialed in at this point, and Karen Gillan rounds out the core party. Watching actors play characters who are themselves playing different characters taps into the same weird dramatic layering you get in games like Persona 5, where the social sim identities and dungeon-crawling selves create this dual-performance dynamic. Nina Alvarez would probably tell me I'm reaching with that comparison, but I'm sticking with it.

What I keep thinking about is the missed opportunity for an actual tie-in game here. The Jumanji reboot franchise is practically begging for a co-op adventure that uses this world and these character classes. Instead we got a mediocre VR experience a few years back and that was about it. Imagine a proper AA budget co-op game, something in the vein of It Takes Two or Unpacking in terms of focused scope, built around the Jumanji game-world rules. Four-player drop-in co-op, distinct character abilities, procedurally generated jungle biomes. That writes itself.

Back in the NES days, every movie got a game. Most of them were rushed garbage, sure, but a few transcended the license. DuckTales. Chronicles of the Kelly Gang, wait, that one was actually pretty rough. Aladdin on Genesis. The point is, the pipeline existed, and occasionally something special came through it. The modern version of that pipeline, licensed games that actually respect the source material and the player, is something I wrote about before when talking about why Avatar Legends matters. The Jumanji franchise feels like the most natural fit imaginable for a good game adaptation, and nobody has pulled the trigger on it.

Sony is releasing the film later this year, so we'll see if Kasdan sticks the landing on the trilogy. The trailer looks fun. The cast is reliable. The video game framing still works. Whether the movie itself delivers is a different question, but as a gaming-adjacent property, Jumanji remains one of the most game-aware franchises in Hollywood. Now if someone over at Sony Interactive Entertainment is reading this, just make the co-op game already. Give it a real budget. Let me play as Jack Black's cartographer mapping a jungle that wants to kill him. I'll be first in line.