Sony Pictures has dropped a trailer for its upcoming horror comedy, Anaconda, a meta-reboot of the 1997 campy cult classic—and frankly, it looks like a lot of fun. Starring Paul Rudd and Jack Black, the film will arrive in theaters on Christmas Day.
(Spoilers for the 1997 film below.)
The original Anaconda was your basic B-movie creature feature, only with an all-star cast and better production values. The plot revolved around a documentary film crew (Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Eric Stoltz, Jonathan Hyde, and Owen Wilson) who travel to the Amazon in search of a long-lost Indigenous tribe. They take on a stranded Paraguayan snake hunter named Serone (Jon Voight, affecting a hilariously bad foreign accent), who strong-arms them into helping him hunt down a 25-foot green anaconda. He wants to capture the animal alive, thinking he can sell it for over $1 million.
The snake has other ideas, chowing down on the boat's skipper and the crew's sound engineer and still hungry for more. The remaining crew's efforts to survive are hampered by Serone, who still wants the snake alive and even kills one of the crew members himself. So it's really a form of justice when he's eaten by a 40-foot queen anaconda at the film's end.
Anaconda wasn't well-received by critics, but it made a decent showing at the box office, grossing about $136 million globally. It has since become a cult classic, one of those "so bad it's good" offerings. It was even nominated for six Razzie Awards, including for Worst Screen Couple (Voight and the animatronic anaconda).
Unlike the original, the humor in 2025's Anaconda is entirely intentional. Per the official logline:
A midlife crisis inspires Doug (Jack Black) and Griff (Paul Rudd) to head into the Amazon rainforest to remake their favorite film from their youth, but everything changes when a real giant anaconda shows up, turning the comically chaotic set into a deadly situation. The movie they’re dying to make? It might just kill them.
Black's Doug is a wedding videographer, while Rudd's Griff is a background actor. The cast also includes Thandiwe Newton and Steve Zahn as Claire and Kenny, friends of Doug and Griff; Selton Mello as Santiago Braga; Daniela Melchior as Ana Almeida; and Ione Skye as Doug's wife, Malie.
The trailer opens with Doug bursting into Griff's home and declaring, "Let's do it. Let's reboot Anaconda." They've dreamed of doing so since they were kids, so why not embark on the adventure of a lifetime to fulfill that dream? They need $2.5 million for their project, but only qualify for a loan of $9,400. So they decide to shoot their film "indie-style" on their shoestring budget. All they need is a riverboat, a script, a snake handler, and a real snake—no cheesy animatronics for this crew! Griff and Claire are the stars, with Kenny on camera and Doug directing.
But Griff panics during a snake attack scene and accidentally kills the stunt snake. That's a problem for a film where the snake is the biggest star. So they head out into the jungle to find a replacement stunt snake—and get much more than they bargained for. Setting the whole thing to Nicki Minaj's "Anaconda" is just a bonus.
Anaconda hits theaters on December 25, 2025.
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