Zathura: A Space Adventure
Two brothers find a mysterious board game in the basement, and it launches their whole house into outer space. From the same picture-book universe as Jumanji, Zathura came out in 2005 with real robots and real miniatures — and a generation of rental-shelf loyalists still swears it's underrated.
Released on November 11, 2005, and directed by Jon Favreau, Zathura was based on Chris Van Allsburg's 2002 children's book and positioned as a standalone spin-off of 1995's Jumanji — another Van Allsburg story about a board game that won't stay a board game. Favreau discouraged people from calling it a sequel; he wanted it to live in its own space. The setup had everything working for it: two squabbling brothers (Josh Hutcherson and Jonah Bobo), their sister (Kristen Stewart), an astronaut who arrives mid-game (Dax Shepard), and their dad (Tim Robbins), all orbiting a tin windup board game that turns the family house into a spacecraft.
Favreau bet on practical effects, saying "it's so fun to actually shoot real spaceships or have a real robot running around," and critics noticed — Roger Ebert gave it three out of four stars, and it landed at 77% on Rotten Tomatoes. None of that helped the box office. With a $65 million budget, it earned $65.1 million worldwide and lost 62% of its audience in its second weekend, partly to the opening of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
For years afterward it lived as a rental-shelf favorite and a cable-rerun staple — the kind of film a generation of viewers discovered on a Saturday afternoon and quietly filed away as a favorite, then grew up wondering why nobody else talked about it.
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Meet the Robinsons
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Mancala
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