An unoriginal epic that fled 17 years in development hell just to lose $150 million and still get a sequel changes course on streaming

It sounds like the most straightforward thing in the world, but not every movie to be awarded a sequel ends up making money. In fact, several of them have gone down in the history books for ranking among the biggest box office bombs there’s ever been, so we’ll just have to wait and see if that Jungle Cruise follow-up really does end up happening.

Of course, the pandemic was largely blamed for the theme park adaptation (which was first announced way back in 2004 in its earliest iteration) falling well short at the multiplex, which is fair enough. By the standards of the time, the Dwayne Johnson vehicle hauling in $221 million from theaters was borderline remarkable, even if it ended up deeply in the red due to its $200 million budget.

Disney sought to recoup some of that revenue through Premier Access, and while Jungle Cruise did earn tens of millions of dollars from PVOD before being made freely available on the streaming service’s content library, estimates that it needed to crack $500 million just to break even ensured the total write-down on the Mouse House’s part was somewhere in the $150 million range.

Nonetheless, it was confirmed in August of 2021 that Jungle Cruise 2 was in the works, and yet we’ve heard nothing of it since. Johnson has a habit of developing many potential franchises that never come to fruition, so nobody would realistically be all that shocked if the unimaginative hybrid of Pirates of the Caribbean, The Mummy, Romancing the Stone, The African Queen, and Indiana Jones that doesn’t have an original bone in its body follows suit.

There’s still an audience for the film, though, seeing as FlixPatrol has outed it as one of Google Play’s biggest hits this weekend, but the jury is out on whether the second installment ever happens.