New ‘Anaconda’ Lacks Original’s Campy Charm

You can chart Hollywood’s transformation between the two films.

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda (2025). (Courtesy Sony)

CAN THE ORIGINAL ANACONDA explain the state of Hollywood? An absurd question on its face, yet . . . perhaps?

In theory, there’s nothing particularly special about this 1997 feature film from auteur Luis Llosa. It’s a fairly straightforward studio programmer, a low-budget creature feature about an intrepid crew of explorers and documentarians trying to find a lost tribe in the Amazon only to get picked off one by one by a massive snake and a deranged snake hunter. The dodgy effects meant it was never going to reach Jurassic Park highs. It even has a relatively formulaic cast: a past-his-prime awards winner, a never-quite-made it lead, a couple solid character actors, and a handful of up-and-comers.

A formulaic cast, yes, but a brilliantly assembled one, as it turns out. The character actors are Danny Trejo (you know him) and Jonathan Hyde (the gruff father/hunter from Jumanji, among dozens of other roles). The up-and-comers are Owen Wilson, Ice Cube, and Jennifer Lopez, all of whom would turn into viable A-listers in the very near future. Eric Stoltz¹ is the never-quite-made-it leading man, riding high off his small but brilliant turn in Pulp Fiction a few years prior. And the past-his-prime Oscar winner is none other than Jon Voight, who earned every penny of his paycheck with one of the most bizarre performances of all time as the snake-hunting Paul Serone.

It’s Voight who turns what should have been a fun-but-disposable movie into a cult classic, a sort of camp masterpiece. You simply haven’t lived until you hear Voight discuss “the privilege of hearing your bones break before the power of [the snake’s] embrace causes your veins to explode” in his lisping Paraguayan affect. The movie is beloved because it’s ridiculous, and you can’t really capture that sort of accidental brilliance.

But this is Hollywood in 2025, so you knew someone would try. Because, after all, Anaconda is a recognizable piece of intellectual property, something people have heard of, something you might have to advertise slightly less to create “awareness” in the public imagination. There is, in fact, a meta-joke about IP in this film—failing actor Ron (Paul Rudd) claims to have secured the rights to Anaconda’s source material in an effort to recruit friends Doug (Jack Black), Kenny (Steve Zahn), and Claire (Thandiwe Newton)—that is intended on some level to excuse the cash-grab nature of this endeavor, but does not. (Spoiler in the footnote here.²)

Jon Voight in Anaconda (1997). (Courtesy Columbia Pictures)

The new Anaconda is not good, precisely, but it is a tribute to the power of star-driven charisma. If you like Jack Black’s goofy energy, Paul Rudd’s aw-shucks everyguy persona, and Steve Zahn operating in his bumbling idiot mode (which is separate from his also-funny befuddled straight man role, most recently seen on the delightful Chad Powers) while Thandiwe Newton plays the inexplicably single beauty, you’ll be tempted to give Anaconda a passing grade: I know I was. There aren’t many “jokes” here, precisely, but there is a lot of good energy, plenty of fun vibes. The quartet really does capture the energy of middle-aged friends desperate for one last adventure, one final bite at the pie of their dreams. I’ll admit to laughing during the discussion of what it means to be “Buffalo Sober.”

And yet, the whole enterprise rankles because it feels like a transparent attempt to capitalize on the sui generis goofiness of the original outing by being “goofy.” Jon Voight’s performance was authentically goofy because he is an actor who made an inexplicable choice; the film’s vibe is authentically goofy because the effects artists were trying to bring a CGI snake to life using software that seems to have been powered by an Apple lle. The whole thing is amusingly silly, as such creature features often are: The world is a poorer place without movies like Mimic, Congo, Relic, and Deep Blue Sea popping up in multiplexes on a regular basis.

The new Anaconda is perfectly representative of another snake plaguing Hollywood at the moment: the ouroboros. A snake infinitely eating its own tail, trapped in place for all time as it recycles itself over and over again, desperately afraid to alienate audiences by attempting something new. Of the twenty highest-grossing movies of 2025, only two were truly “original” outings: Sinners and Weapons. (I think F1: The Movie counts as IP, since they had to put “The Movie” in the title to differentiate it from every other element of Formula One racing.) We live in an age of reruns and rehashes, an age in which the best many filmmakers can do is weakly gesture toward the self-knowledge that they’re cannibalizing their own industry for parts.

All of which is to say that Anaconda is not the worst movie I’ve seen all year: It’s a mild diversion, entertaining at times. (It’s certainly no Wicked: For Good.) But it is, perhaps, the film that best represents where Hollywood is at the end of 2025: a snake eating its own tail. May 2026 bring us something new!

1. I want to make it clear that the “never-quite-made-it” tag here is descriptive and not derogatory: I like Stoltz a lot as an actor, he just never quite made the leap into regular leading man.

2. Spoiler: Ron is lying, and gets caught in his lie when their tiny effort stumbles across a massive Sony Pictures crew shooting their own reboot. When Ron says he didn’t think anyone would care, the character played by Jack Black—star of, among other films, The Super Mario Bros. and Minecraft—incredulously says “About IP?” Good joke, everybody laugh.