Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube gave 'stamp of approval' to Anaconda reboot

Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube gave the Anaconda reboot their “stamp of approval”.

The pair starred in the original 1997 movie which tells the story of a documentary film crew in the Amazon rainforest led by a snake hunter who is hunting down a giant, legendary green anaconda.

And, when writer Kevin Etten and writer / director Tom Gormican decided to remake the film, they reached out to Jennifer and Ice Cube for cameos, which the pair agreed to.

Gormican told Variety: “We were always thinking that it would be fun to have the surviving members. So we just kept reaching out. [They gave their] stamp of approval.”

The new movie features Paul Rudd and Jack Black and Gormican describes it as “a buddy movie that becomes an adventure film that becomes an action film that becomes a horror film.”

He went on: “Audiences are just tired of not seeing original stories. It’s been a decade of, ‘Here’s some remakes of stuff that you used to love,’ and there’s a limit to people’s nostalgia.”

While the new movie makes reference to the original, including running into a “real” Sony crew working on a reboot, Gormican wanted to move away from the source material.

He said: “These are two stories about taking a boat up the river, right? A snake basically slithers on land or in the water. It can either wrap around you or bite you. So you’re locked into the ways that it kills, and you’re locked into a structure of going from point A to point B, which is what this shares with the original story…I have a lot of reverence for the original. I love what they did. [But] I didn’t want to play in that sandbox.”