San Francisco 49ers Coach Kyle Shanahan's Family Forced Him to See Jumanji Over Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

There is no shortage of new movies to go see in theaters this holiday season, between dramas like Uncut Gems, animated fare like Spies in Disguise, and nightmare fuel like Cats. For those who want something on the action-adventure side, both Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and Jumanji: The Next Level have you covered. But there's still the dilemma of which movie to see first -- which apparently became a conundrum for Kyle Shanahan, the coach of the San Francisco 49ers. In a new interview with NBC Bay Area, Shanahan spoke about how his family usually attends a movie on Christmas Day, but that his desire to see The Rise of Skywalker was outvoted by the rest of his family.

"I lost the vote," Shanahan explained. "We usually try to see a movie later on Christmas afternoon, and I was dying to see Star Wars. I've been waiting for a while ... and I lost the vote. We went and saw [Jumanji: The Next Level], which was good, too. I'm a Jumanji fan, but I'm still a little bitter about not seeing Star Wars."

This isn't the first time that Jumanji and Star Wars released new installments so close to each other, as Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle debuted just weeks before Star Wars: The Last Jedi in 2017. Both films ended up doing well at the box office, and it looks like the friendly competition affected Jumanji in a unique way.

"You're going up against the monster and Star Wars," producer Hiram Garcia admitted in an interview with ComicBook.com. "You don't know if you're just going to get kind of lost in this tide away. And we started to realize all of a sudden that, 'You know, fans were really loving this.'" The movie ended up having great legs at the box office, prompting the realization of having a possible franchise on their hands."

"We do have something special here, a testament to Jake [Kasdan] and to the cast as well, where everyone loved the idea of doing another one," Garcia added. "You just had to be right. Like Matt [Tolmach] was saying, it's like it has to be worthy of telling the story. It wasn't just going to be a quick grab of like, 'Oh, let's just do another sequel.' No, we created something special."

Both Jumanji: The Next Level and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker are in theaters now.

(Photo by Lachlan Cunningham/Getty Images)