It seems like nobody is smelling what The Rock is cookin’ anymore. Just when it looked like Moana was as bad as it could get for Dwayne Johnson this year, a new report suggests Jumanji: Open World could be in trouble too.
Industry insider Jeff Sneider shared a piece on The InSneider this week titled “The Rock’s In a Hard Place,” bringing together six industry experts offering advice on Johnson’s career after a string of flops, alongside the first test screening review for Jumanji: Open World. And according to Sneider’s own teaser for the piece, it “ain’t pretty.”
Disney’s live-action Moana, with Johnson reprising Maui, opened to just $43 million domestically against a reported $250 million production budget – a catastrophic result for a film with that kind of price tag attached. Worldwide, reports have pegged the opening closer to $95 million, nowhere near the pace needed to make that budget back.
It’s a brutal reminder of just how far Johnson’s box office pull has fallen. This isn’t an isolated miss, either – it’s the latest entry in a pattern that’s been building for years:
- Jungle Cruise (2021): $200M budget, $220M worldwide
- Black Adam (2022): $190–260M budget, $393.6M worldwide
- Red One (2024): ~$250M budget, $186M worldwide
- The Smashing Machine (2025): ~$20M worldwide
- Moana (2026, live action): ~$250M budget, opened to just $95M worldwide
If you compare those numbers to what Johnson used to draw before, it shows a steep fall. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle made nearly $1 billion worldwide. Jumanji: The Next Level pulled in $792 million. And even the animated Moana 2 from 2024 made over $1 billion.
So, the guy who once seemed incapable of losing at the box office is now on one of the ugliest runs of any A-lister in Hollywood. Only Jared Leto could probably compete.
Considering that the Jumanji franchise has always been a good bet, Johnson was probably hoping that Jumanji 4 (or Jumanji 5, depending on how you count them) would be able to jumpstart his career again. But the news from The InSneider is worrying.
According to Jeff Sneider, Jumanji: Open World, the fifth film in the franchise, which is set to close out the rebooted trilogy on Christmas Day, hasn’t been testing well — which seems to be a sentiment reported by a few people online. Another industry watcher noted they’d “heard the test scores for Jumanji: Open World have not been great.”
That’s a genuinely uncomfortable position for Sony to be in. Jumanji: Open World reunites Johnson with Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Karen Gillan, Danny DeVito, and Nick Jonas, and director Jake Kasdan is back behind the camera for a franchise that has, until now, been close to bulletproof.
Filming began with a tribute to the late Robin Williams, and Karen Gillan has already been teasing her physical transformation for the shoot.
So, if this film is having shaky test screenings, it points to a real problem. Johnson’s slide is starting to echo Jared Leto’s.
Earlier this year, Leto’s Masters of the Universe bombed despite strong reviews, largely because fans wanted to avoid films with him in them. In fact, his presence has become a liability that studios can no longer ignore. Amazon MGM even tried to remove him from most of the marketing, and that didn’t even really work.
The truth is that Johnson is probably still a lot more likeable than Leto. The issue probably lies in the fact that audiences have seen him in the same roles too many times over the years. He’s always wearing the same shirt and playing the same character in very similar universes. And at this point, audiences are no longer treating his name as a reason to show up.
Sony has plenty of time to course-correct Jumanji: Open World before December, though. Early test screenings allow the filmmakers to go back and do reshoots, recuts and rework the film before its release date.
For now, Dwayne Johnson needs to treat the reports as a caution. He needs to rethink how he picks his next few films, or else.
