LeBron James is in for the game of his life in second trailer for Space Jam: A New Legacy

You probably know the formula for a Space Jam story at this point, even though there's only been one movie. A sci-fi villain does something nefarious, a basketball star is put in peril, and it's up to that basketball star and his new best friends the Looney Tunes to save the day.

It's a simple, entertaining formula, and the real secret sauce isn't the setup, but the payoff. How are Bugs and the gang gonna get out of this one? Well, the first trailer for Space Jam: A New Legacy was about the setup. The second one, which just dropped today, is about the payoff, and that means lots of cartoon basketball action. 

This time around, it's NBA superstar LeBron James who winds up teaming up with the Tunes for the game of his life, and the stakes couldn't be higher. James isn't just playing to free himself. He's playing to free his video game-obsessed son (Cedric Joe) who was sucked into the virtual "Serververse" by the villainous Al G. Rhythm (Don Cheadle), a digital titan who seems to have basically every popular property owned by WarnerMedia under his control.

To get his family back, LeBron must battle Rhythm's "Goon Squad" of super-powered basketball stars, with no one but the Looney Tunes at his back. Oh, and for extra fun, if they lose, the Looney Tunes will be deleted from the server forever. It's a lot to live up to, but in the trailer below, you'll see that the Tunes are definitely not going down without a very wacky fight.

In the first trailer for the film earlier this year, we saw a lot of the preamble to this clash of titans, as the footage worked to set up the stakes within LeBron's family, re-introduced the Tunes and lay out the threat of Al-G Rhythm. This time around, we get a significantly bigger look at the back half of the film, as LeBron and the Tunes enter the virtual arena to battle the Goon Squad and win by whatever means necessary.

Anyone who's ever seen the original Space Jam remembers the moment Michael Jordan stretched his arm to cartoonish length to dunk a basketball from half court, and we're expecting A New Legacy to bring its own version of wacky moments like that to the table. Well, as this trailer shows, the new film remembers that moment and ups the ante with everything from a flattened Tweety to a device that multiplies Wile E. Coyote. 

Space Jam: A New Legacy arrives with even more basketball hijinks in theaters and on HBO Max July 16.