The wildest horror reboot of 2025 takes on a major movie trend

The original Anaconda is one of the greatest so-bad-it’s-good horror movies of all time. The plot is illogical, the CGI snake is cartoonish, the cast is full of future A-listers (Jennifer Lopez! Owen Wilson! Ice Cube!) who clearly regretted their decision, and it’s all anchored by Jon Voight doing the worst South American accent of all time (he won Worst Fake Accent at the Stinker Awards the year it came out). This was 1997, however, and Hollywood was a very different place, so Anaconda still managed to make over $136 million at the box office and spawned four sequels.

Almost three decades later (and exactly 10 years since the last Anaconda movie: a made-for-TV Lake Placid crossover), the franchise returns with a meta-remake titled simply Anaconda. The 2025 film is more of a comedy than a horror flick, although it does have a few good snake-related jump scares. But instead of retreading familiar territory, it stars Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Steve Zahn, and Thandiwe Newton as a group of friends who set out to film a spiritual sequel to their favorite ‘90s cult classic.

Directed by Tom Gormican (The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent), Anaconda pokes fun at modern Hollywood’s reboot obsession, but it’s primarily a slapstick comedy. For Gormican, it’s also a loving tribute to the 1977 creature feature that launched the entire franchise.

“I’m a huge fan of the original,” Gormican tells Polygon. “The challenge was to find a way in that felt kind of clever or different and wasn’t like a traditional remake or reboot. We make fun of the idea of reboots.”

Image: Dani Ferreira/Sony

Anaconda also pokes fun at another modern Hollywood trend: horror movies with serious themes (think Jordan Peele’s Get Out and its take on race, or Ari Aster’s trauma-obsessed Midsommar). Gormican’s Anaconda isn’t trying to say anything too deep about the human condition, but its characters convince themselves that’s exactly what they’re doing. Multiple times in the film, Black and Rudd simply shout at each other excitedly “Themes!” while imagining that their micro-budget remake will tackle complex topics like misogyny and economic injustice.

Don’t interpret this as a cheap shot at socially conscious horror movies, however. Gormican’s just having fun.

“It’s not a broader statement,” he says. “I love those movies. I just felt like there was no room for fun anymore. You can have a movie that feels like a big ride where people can jump on and have a great time on this adventure, but also be clever and different and not have to be sitting there saying, ‘Here’s our themes.’ So we had our characters talk about it in the middle of the movie. But there’s no larger statement. There’s room for all.”

Anaconda slithers into theaters on Dec. 25.