[Trending News] ‘Jurassic World Rebirth’ Goes for the Jugular: “There’s a Little Bit of Everything That’s Scary”

The story follows members of a recovery team—led by Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, and Jonathan Bailey—as they venture to an island near the equator that was once home to the first Jurassic Park’s research lab. The squad is trying to retrieve genetic material that could lead to a medical breakthrough for humanity, but three decades later the mistakes made at that ruined facility have not gone away. They’ve endured—and only grown bigger. “These are the dinosaurs that didn’t work. There’s some mutations in there,” Marshall says. “They’re all based on real dinosaur research, but they look a little different.”

Imagine the nightmare version of the giant lizards that evolved naturally millions of years ago. Rebirth director Gareth Edwards, best known for the 2016 Star Wars tale Rogue One and 2023’s AI dystopia The Creator, drew upon classics that have curdled blood for generations. “When you make a creature, you get a big, massive pot and you pour in your favorite monsters from other films and books,” he says.

The filmmaker’s beastly bona fides are already well established. He made his breakthrough with 2010’s Monsters, about invasive alien titans who fall to Earth, and followed that up by tackling the granddaddy of globe-threatening kaiju with 2014’s Godzilla. Adding to his Rebirth dinosaur inspiration were a few other favorites: the skeletal Xenomorph from Alien, the dungeon behemoth from Return of the Jedi, and the original Big Bad from Spielberg’s first Jurassic Park movie. Those references turn up all in one particular twisted dinosaur that turns up in the trailer coming Wednesday. “Some Rancor went in there, some H.R. Giger went in there, a little T. rex went in there…” Edwards says.

UPDATE: The trailer is now out.

The thing that scared Edwards the most was living up to Rebirth’s predecessor, which he feels has been disguised as family-friendly fare over the years. “Jurassic Park is a horror film in the witness protection program,” Edwards adds. “Most people don’t think of it like that. We all went to see it as kids. But I was scared shitless, to be honest, when I was at the cinema watching the T. rex attack. It’s one of the most well-directed scenes in cinema history, so the bar’s really high to come on board and try and do this.”

Screenwriter David coepp (Death Becomes Her, 2002’s Spider-Man), who adapted the late Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel for the first movie, has gone back to the original source material to pull out a scene for the new movie that he had always hoped to use. Marshall has revealed that it’s a sequence in which Dr. Grant and the two children (who are not characters in this new movie) attempt to drift through a lagoon in a rubber raft without waking a slumbering Tyrannosaurus rex. They don’t succeed, and end up paddling for their lives. “The tyrannosaur was now chest-deep in the water, but it could hold its big head high above the surface,” Crichton wrote. “Then Grant realized the animal wasn’t swimming, it was walking, because moments later only the very top of the head—the eyes and nostrils—protruded above the surface. By then it looked like a crocodile, and it swam like a crocodile, swinging its big tail back and forth, so the water churned behind it.”