Zathura trailer and test audience response?

So I have a five year old. A five year old who loves movies. We see a LOT of kid’s movies. Hell, I even sort of liked the new Herbie movie.

Well, two parts of it, at least, if you get my drift.

Anyway, because of the above facts I have been incapable of escaping the trailer for the movie ‘Zathura’.

NOTE: I’m only going to spoil info in the trailer. Does that count as a spoiler?

Up until recently the trailer has revealed that the father leaves two small boys (age approx 10 and 7 or so) home alone to do some business type thing. Chaos ensues.

But in the trailer preceding ‘Corpse Bride’ suddenly the trailer features the father telling a sleeping ‘older sister’ (approx age 16 or so) that he’s leaving the boys with her. Then chaos ensues.

And I’m thinking to myself, “Hey, the changed that up? I wonder if the test audiences had a strong negative reaction to the father leaving the kids home alone?”

Then I knew to ask you people. Anyone know the scoop on whether Zathura had to go into re-shoots to insert an older sister character to cover the father’s leaving the kids home alone?

The IMDB entry says it’s based on a book of the same name (I’d not heard of this film or book before your OP). So I guess that might be the first place to check.

BTW, Dax Shephard of “Punk’d” fame is one of the “stars” of this movie. That’s not terribly encouraging.

No clue but that’s an interesting theory. I saw the same trailers you did, I think, and you’re right - they didn’t feature the older sister in the original version of the trailer.

Slight hijack: My first reaction the first time I saw the preview was “What a rip-off of Jumanji!”. Then at the end of the trailer I saw “from the makers of Jumanji”. So I amazon’ed the book title and sure enough, it’s a sort-of sequel to Jumanji (in the books, anyway). Van Allsburg ripped off his own plot.

The author of the book also wrote Polar Express and has another movie being made called The Witches Broom.

Mine too.
But, heck, I liked Jumanji enough that Jumanji-In-Space will probably be fun, too.

Don’t have an answer for the OP except I’m positive this movie is going to really, really suck. Which is a shame…such a waste of a good premise.

Well, it’s not unusual for a movie to have multiple trailers. I did go the the Apple site and the movie site and they only have one trailer available. (one with the sister) Maybe, after the new trailer came out they took down the old version.

It’s pretty doubtful that they added another character. Trailers are tested with audiences. A more likely case is that they got more of the f/x shots done so they wanted a new trailer. They added the older sister to show a little more of the story.

I think it’s quite likely that they added a sister character after test audiences weighed in. In the book, there is no sister, and the boys are explicitly left alone.

From what can be seen of the (latest) trailer, the sister character seems to serve no purpose apart from absolving the father of responsibility for leaving the boys alone for a short time, and she does seem as though she might be spoojed into the story in a way that could managed afterwards without having to reshoot much. At first she doesn’t want to get out of bed – and (presumably after being roused by her panicking brothers) she is promptly locked in the bathroom in suspended animation. She’s there to be not-there. Most of the the action seems to show the boys alone.

Sounds like a likely afterthought to me, especially if an earlier trailer gave the impression that the boys were alone, as they were in the book.

You can view the first trailer here, if you don’t mind installing a crappy AOLVideo plugin.

Just saw the movie.

The older sister seems pretty integrated into the whole movie, so I suspect she was in all along.

Also, we loved the movie. Jumanji was pretty darn forgettable. This one was far superior, IMHO.