The Jurassic World movies lost touch with the horror elements that made the Steven Spielberg original so great, but the the disappointment of Jurassic World Dominion.
Despite being produced on an absurdly accelerated schedule to make its release date on July 2, 2025, Jurassic World Rebirth is shaping up to be a return to form for the franchise. The original movie’s screenwriter David Koepp is back to pen the script, Rogue One’s Gareth Edwards is in the director’s chair, and the cast is rounded out with great actors like Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali. To truly succeed, though, Jurassic World Rebirth will have to bring back a key element of Spielberg’s original movie that the previous Jurassic World films forgot about.
Jurassic World Rebirth Can Bring Horror Back To Jurassic Park
The Original Jurassic Park Was A Genuinely Scary Movie
Spielberg’s original Jurassic Park is the perfect blockbuster movie — it’s fun for the whole family, it tells a timeless story, and it’s filled with big laughs and bigger action sequences — but it’s also a genuinely scary film. It builds a spine-chilling sense of dread when the T. rex escapes from its enclosure, it draws viewers to the edge of their seats when the velociraptors stalk Tim in the kitchen, and it gets an effective jump scare out of the severed arm reveal. Spielberg made Jurassic Park as terrifying as possible while still being suitable for audiences of all ages.
Jurassic World Rebirth's 10 Biggest Rumors
A new Jurassic movie, Jurassic World Rebirth, is currently in the works, and the rumor mill is running wild with speculation about the sequel.
The same can’t be said of most of the sequels. Jurassic Park III has a really terrifying sequence when the characters are shrouded by high-altitude fog and terrorized by a swarm of pterodactyls. But for the most part, it’s an Indiana Jones-style action-adventure where the stakes never feel particularly high. There are plenty of factors in the box office success of Jurassic Park — for starters, it broke new ground with its mind-blowing visual effects — but the visceral fear it elicited was a key reason to watch it in a crowded theater, and the ensuing franchise didn’t keep that up.
Jurassic World Became So Big, The Movies Were No Longer Scary
The High-Stakes Spectacle Undermined The Ground-Level Terror
The Jurassic franchise’s disappointing lack of the original film’s horror elements is on full display in the Jurassic World movies. As that trilogy went on and the stakes got higher and higher (eventually going global), the widespread spectacle eventually undermined the ground-level terror. The first Jurassic World film had one great horror sequence with the Indominus rex picking off security guards in the jungle, and Fallen Kingdom devolves into a haunted house movie in its second half. But by the third movie, when the dinosaurs had escaped onto the mainland, those horror elements vanished.
Jurassic World Dominion has the franchise’s lowest Rotten Tomatoes score with 29%.
Dominion is more of a globetrotting James Bond action epic than a sci-fi horror movie. It’s more focused on delivering big set-pieces like a motorcycle chase or a plane crash than a good fright. And as a result, the danger feels completely weightless. When the characters are being stalked by a T. rex, an overturned car — which was once a death trap in the original movie — suddenly becomes a safe haven to hide out in. There’s never any reason to fear for the characters, because there’s never any reason to believe they’re genuinely at risk.
Jurassic World Rebirth Must Find The Balance Between Fun And Horror
It Can't Just Be A Straight-Up Horror Movie — It Still Needs The Spielbergian Sense Of Fun
As great as it would be for Jurassic World Rebirth to bring back the original film’s horror elements, it can’t just be a straight-up horror movie. It has to find the right balance between horror and good ol’ Spielbergian fun. That was the magic of the original movie; Spielberg would terrify the audience with a foreboding T. rex climbing out of its paddock and stalking its prey, then alleviate the tension with the sight gag of a lawyer getting eaten off a toilet. Rebirth has to find a way to recapture that.
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Jurassic World Rebirth has already confirmed a shocking twist will be included in the sequel, leaving room to theorize and predict the possibilities.
Edwards has already proven he can handle this balancing act. His Godzilla remake creates an unsettling sense of the titular monster’s scale, but it also doesn’t forget to have fun with the kaiju concept. Rogue One has all the pew-pew action of a typical Star Wars film, but it also has Darth Vader’s hair-raising climactic hallway massacre. There’s no doubt that he can pull off the same trick in Jurassic World Rebirth.
Jurassic World Rebirth
- Release Date
- July 2, 2025
- Runtime
- 134 Minutes
- Director
- Gareth Edwards
- Writers
- David Koepp, Michael Crichton
- Prequel(s)
- Jurassic World: Dominion
Cast
Zora Bennett
Jonathan BaileyDr. Henry Loomis
Duncan Kincaid
Martin Krebs
Five years after Jurassic World Dominion, Earth's ecology confines dinosaurs to equatorial zones. Zora Bennett, a covert ops expert, leads a team to secure genetic material from massive dinosaurs for a life-saving drug.
