As they prepare to release their $200 million-plus Disney tentpole, the newly minted BFFs now lean on each other for career guidance: "I go to him for advice because he lived in the trenches."
Jungle Cruise is an upcoming American adventure film based on the Disney theme park attraction of the same name, as it was once Pirates of the Caribbean. Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra , the film will star Dwayne Johnson , Emily Blunt and Edgar Ramirez , and will be released on July 30, 2021, by Walt Disney Pictures .
Synopsis
Set in the 1930s during the Great Depression , a ship captain named Frank takes a scientist and her brother on a jungle mission to find the Tree of Life believed to have healing powers. Meanwhile, the trio must fight dangerous wild animals and compete against a German expedition (in Nazi times).
READ ALSO: Jungle Cruise (2021) Película Completa Gratis
How Dwayne Johnson Wooed Emily Blunt for ‘Jungle Cruise’ — and Why She Ghosted Him
At about 4 a.m. in the fall of 2017, after a tiring night shoot on Universal’s Skyscraper, Dwayne Johnson, arguably the busiest person in Hollywood, set aside some time to film a video for Emily Blunt. At the time, he was attached to star in Jungle Cruise, which various producers had been trying to get off the ground at Disney since at least 2004, after the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie revealed the moneymaking potential of a theme park ride reimagined as a film franchise.
Johnson, who had been taken with Blunt since The Devil Wears Prada, felt she’d be his ideal sparring partner in the film, which was envisioned as a two-hander. “I had always admired her as an actor, but also when I would watch her on talk shows, she had this personality that was effervescent, that was cool and very, very charming.” So far Blunt was proving impervious to what producer Beau Flynn calls the filmmakers’ “unilateral targeted attack.” Looking to take a break after shooting Mary Poppins Returns and A Quiet Place back-to-back, she had declined to read a script and remained unmoved even after receiving a heartfelt letter from Sean Bailey, the chief of Disney’s live-action studio.
So when Jungle Cruise‘s taciturn Spanish director, Jaume Collet-Serra, was planning to fly to New York to hand deliver a script directly to Blunt at her home in Brooklyn, Johnson wanted to send him along with the video as a kind of charm assist. “I must have shot it about five or six times because I had not communicated with Emily yet,” Johnson says. “I had not even met her. And I wanted to let her know via this video just how important she was to this movie and how I only wanted her in this movie. And it was great. And I … I actually never heard again from Emily. Didn’t respond at all. Just ghosted me.”
READ ALSO: Space jam 2 Una Nueva Era (2021) Película Completa
Says Blunt, with a smile: “I thought the video was sweet. Didn’t know you were going to be so sensitive.” Chalk up the misunderstanding to cultural differences — her British reserve versus his wrestling-ring-decibel enthusiasm. Eventually, spurred by Collet-Serra’s pitch that the film would be reminiscent of the Indiana Jones films and Romancing the Stone (and Johnson’s “sweet” video), Blunt did read the script and was won over, with the additional help of a generous payday.
Now the duo are on a soundstage in Atlanta in mid-July, where Johnson is in the final weeks of filming the Warner Bros. superhero movie Black Adam and Blunt has flown in from shooting a BBC/Amazon Western series in Spain to join him for Jungle Cruise press. The pair are seated in front of a lavish boat and jungle set, as crew around them arrange some prop shrubbery. With all the Disney promotional jazz hands deployed, this scene almost feels like the pre-pandemic movie business, save for the masks on the crew.
Brought together onscreen for their odd-couple appeal, offscreen the duo share a business savvy. As the film industry undergoes the most dramatic period of change in its more than 100-year history, battered by COVID and the rapid adoption of streaming, these two actors are navigating the moment with a shrewdness and an unusually hands-on approach to contracts, distribution and marketing. Where they differ is on their willingness to openly engage on such matters.
Periodically throughout the interview, Blunt seems to be trying to keep Johnson’s candor in check. When he starts to answer a question about their contracts, she’ll interject, “You’ll be quoted.” Some of this is a shtick they’ve adopted for the film’s promotion, but some is genuinely rooted in their DNA. As stars, Blunt, 38, and Johnson, 49, barely seem to hail from the same galaxy. “He said to me once, ‘I love that your debut was onstage with Dame Judi Dench and mine was in the wrestling ring cutting myself with razors,’ ” Blunt says.
This summer they’re bringing audiences a $200 million-plus, four-quadrant popcorn movie that would have seemed like an obvious profit engine for its studio in any other era. Instead, their movie, which will open in theaters and on Disney+ (for a $30 fee) on July 30, is the latest test of the moviegoing audience’s appetites a year and a half into the COVID-19 pandemic. Jungle Cruise is a family-oriented film coming out at a time when most children in the U.S. and around the world are not yet vaccinated and COVID cases once again are spiking globally because of new variants. Despite the health news, there have been some encouraging signs at the box office, most recently with Disney’s July 9 hybrid release of Black Widow, which debuted to a pandemic-era best of $158.8 million at the worldwide box office, plus another $60 million on Disney+. (Black Widow dropped a steep 67 percent at the box office in its second weekend, prompting the National Association of Theatre Owners to blame the studio’s simultaneous release strategy for a “stunning collapse.”)
READ ALSO: Space jam 2 (2021) Película Completa Online
“We all created our own space at home where we watched and consumed our movies,” Johnson says of how the pandemic changed the business. “We wondered, once we got back to the theatrical experience, are the majority of people now going, ‘You know what, I’m good. We’re going to watch it at home’? What we’re seeing now [at theaters] starting with A Quiet Place and Cruella, and then Fast & Furious and certainly with Black Widow … it’s invigorating.”
Johnson’s hardest role yet, he says, is the one he’s shooting now, in Black Adam, in which he plays the titular DC Comics
Johnson wants the theatrical business to bounce back for the sake of his studio partners, but his own viewing habits resemble the most couch-bound of consumers, since he has not been able to go to a movie without being instantly recognized and mobbed by fans since the 1990s. Blunt, meanwhile, goes to the theater incognito all the time. “I’m small, I blend in,” she says. “Put on a hat. It’s fun.” Where she’s a diehard for the theatrical experience, “I’m like, ‘Listen, Emily,’ ” Johnson says, lifting his iPhone. ” ‘Watch this movie. Turn it sideways. Look, we’ll watch this for two and a half hours.’ ”
The two brought those disparate perspectives into their meetings with Disney about how to release Jungle Cruise, with the studio ultimately deciding on the hybrid release strategy due to the slow pace of vaccine rollouts globally.
READ ALSO: Space jam 2 (2021) Estreno: Ver la película completa gratis
Johnson says that after finishing Jungle Cruise, he and Blunt continued to consult with each other about how to handle production during the pandemic and how to manage their deals — which often have been linked to box office — amid the changing release strategies. “We’re all trying to figure it out,” Johnson says. “Emily and I have had this conversation about how one thing will impact another, these dollars are dollars now and then down the line. It’s an important conversation for us to have.” Blunt says she has relied on him for counsel as she navigates the next stage of her career. “I really appreciate that DJ comes from struggle,” Blunt says. “He comes from some hard times, and he wears it very lightly and in a very wise philosophical sense. And so I do go to him for advice because he has lived in the trenches. He has not just winged it, and it has not been this meteoric rise to where he is now. It’s been a lot of razor blades and tears.”
Jungle Cruise, which is based on a 65-year-old riverboat cruise theme park ride, is no slam dunk. While 2003’s Pirates became a five-film box office juggernaut, that same year’s The Haunted Mansion was panned, and Disney’s most recent ride-inspired movie, Tomorrowland, flopped — even in the much more hospitable 2015 moviegoing environment — grossing just $209 million globally. Box office tracking has been less predictive during the pandemic, but some sources close to the film already are worried about Jungle Cruise, hopeful the Disney+ premium offering buttresses their numbers, like it did for Disney’s Cruella. As the studio did with Black Widow, in a rare display of transparency for the streaming era, it is expected to release the Disney+ numbers for Jungle Cruise publicly.
READ ALSO: Donde Ver Fast & Furious 9 (2021) Película Completa
Over the years, Disney had dabbled with multiple versions of Jungle Cruise, including one starring Tom Hanks and Tim Allen. In 2015, producers John Davis and John Fox came up with an idea inspired by the origins of the ride, which itself was inspired by the 1951 Humphrey Bogart–Katharine Hepburn adventure film The African Queen. With Disney’s blessing, they brought the pitch for a contentious, evenly matched male-female duo making their way on a riverboat adventure to Johnson’s production company, Seven Bucks, and he signed on within two days. It would be more than two years before they signed the actress to play Hepburn to Johnson’s Bogey and several drafts before they landed on the shooting script, which has five credited writers (screenplay by Glenn Ficarra, John Requa and Michael Green, with additional story credits for Josh Goldstein and John Norville).