Universal Pictures
Outta nowhere, Jurassic World is now the number one box office opener of all time (in straight dollars, anyway ‐ adjust for inflation and Indominus Rex is barely nipping at Gone With the Wind’s ankles). It has earned a sequel. Several, most likely. And according to director Colin Trevorrow, those sequels will follow closely along the path that Jurassic World established ‐ not “arbitrary and episodic” Jurassic World sequels, but “a series that would feel like a complete story.”
So let’s extrapolate: what elements of Jurassic World will we be seeing next time around?
1. More Dinosaurs Who Act Like People
Before Jurassic World, dinosaurs were animals, motivated entirely by natural instinct. After Jurassic World, that’s no longer the case. The Indominous Rex is a straight-up villain who clearly enjoys the act of killing (and in the nastiest ways, too- after knocking an Ankylosaurus onto its back, she goes for the face instead of the obvious, exposed underbelly).
And with Rexy the T-Rex and Blue the Velociraptor, we have hero dinosaurs. Maybe not at the outset of Jurassic World, but by the time Blue scrambles back into the fight in valiant slow-motion… yep. Hero dinosaurs. Ditto for when Rexie decides to ignore Blue and four very edible humans and quietly peace out, or when Blue and Rexie give each other a head nod of mutual respect, post-battle. These are very human attributes, given to dinosaurs to make them action-hero awesome.
Jurassic World 2 might as well own it, right? Let’s push this further. More dinosaurs fighting on the side of good. More dinosaurs fighting on the same side as us humans (presumably, against newer, nastier hybrids). It’ll be a fine line. People want to root for dinosaur heroes (at least I do), but a bringing together a legit dinosaur super-team might be a step too far.
2. The Park Is Closed
Masrani- aka the guy who owned the company who owned Jurassic World- is still lying under charred helicopter wreckage somewhere. Several dozen people probably perished when the flying dinosaurs got loose. And with a cell phone in every pocket, the whole world probably found out about 30 seconds after the carnage began. No way in hell Jurassic World stays open with no CEO, billions of dollars in wrongful death lawsuits and hours of viral footage that will forever link “dinosaur theme park” and “human chum in a dinosaur feeding frenzy” in the court of public opinion.
So it’s a very fair assumption that Jurassic World 2 will not be set in any kind of dinosaur theme park. Although if Jurassic World really is closing, here’s a fun question to ponder: what happens to the dinos still in the park?
3. Dr. Wu Will Return…
Dr. Henry Wu does what Dennis Nedry never could: at the end of Jurassic World, he grabs his ill-gotten embryos and skitters away, safe from harm. We also know that Wu has sold out, and that he and Vic Hoskins were really engineering the Indominous Rex as a potential weapon, behind a thousand closed doors without any kind of oversight.
This is a real, on-the-nose sequel tease, a “The Villainous Dr. Wu Will Return…” kind of thing. Hoskins might be dead, but the one guy who can actually make a dinosaur from scratch just grabbed his toolkit and fled. He could be anywhere, doing anything. Probably, he’ll be making more dinosaurs.
Universal Pictures
4. Dinosaurs Go Open Source
Or maybe the whole world will. On the subject of sequels, Trevorrow posed a question to EW: “What happens when this technology goes open source?”
Trevorrow also told Cinema Blend about a line he cut from an early scene between Wu and Simon Masrani. The line, spoken by Wu: “How long do you think you can control it? We won’t always be the only ones who can make a dinosaur.”
Seems pretty clear-cut. Before long, every tech company with the resources to build a dinosaur will be building a dinosaur, and Jurassic World will take on a greater meaning beyond the name of the park. I guess the extent of society’s dinosaur-ization depends on how far into the future we go for Jurassic World 2. Dinosaurs in the wild? Dinosaurs in the military? Archaeopteryx (declawed, of course) will no doubt be the latest craze in exotic pets.
5. Owen and Barry: Dinosaur Bros
Barry, played by Omar Sy, didn’t serve much of a purpose in Jurassic World. Mostly, he hung around the raptors and delivered an occasional piece of raptor exposition. But Jurassic World 2 might expand Barry’s role quite a bit. “I wanted to create a relationship there that could be memorable and potentially carry on to future films,” Trevorrow teased in an interview with Empire last year.
Memorable? Eh, not really. As far as relationships go, Jurassic World really pushes Owen, Claire and the boys as a family unit, and you’d think a sequel would plant its heart in the same foursome. But those kids have actual parents to go home to, and Owen’s going to have to do something in the interim between Jurassic World and Jurassic World 2. Hopefully, that something will involve a generous increase in Omar Sy’s screen time.
6. The Return of Stegoceratops?
Indominous Rex wasn’t meant to be Jurassic World’s only hybrid. In early drafts, there was a second: Stegoceratops, a Stegosaurus/Triceratops blend with the body of the former and the head of the latter. Originally, Owen and Claire stumbled upon the big weirdo while scurrying through the jungle, but Trevorrow cut it from the script just before shooting.
Trevorrow’s reasoning behind the cut (via Empire): “My six-year-old son watched Return Of The Jedi, and said to me, ‘Dad, if Leia is also a Jedi that means that Luke isn’t unique.’ It was like, ‘Ha! Okay.’ And for some reason I applied that to this other thing and felt like there could be only one [hybrid dinosaur]. The idea that there was more than one made it feel less like the one synthetic among all the other organics, and suddenly it seemed entirely wrong to have it in the movie.”
But it was too late to cut Stegoceratops from the merchandise, so there’s a Stegoceratops in Jurassic World: The Game and a Stegoceratops chilling in the toy aisle with all the other Jurassic World dinos. It was even in the film for half a second. Examine the computer screen below.
If dinosaur tech truly does go open source next time, the idea of “one synthetic amongst the organics” will be a moot point. We’ll have hybrids and synthetic freaks out the wazoo. Maybe even our old friend Stegoceratops.
7. Ice Age Animals?
iDigitalTimes sniffed out a neat little tease in the early Jurassic World viral marketing. On InGen’s “official site,” there’s a news blurb about InGen opening a new Martel facility in Siberia, intent on drilling through the ice to “find organic remains dating from 40,000 to 200,000 years ago.” That just about covers the Ice Age, when the giant lizards were gone but giant mammals were very much in vogue. Wooly mammoths, dire wolves, sabretooth tigers, beavers the size of cars and eagles the size of small planes. Just in case it wasn’t obvious enough, Martel is also “believed to be situated over a group of wooly mammoths buried under the permafrost.”
Smart money says the people writing the viral marketing blurbs don’t have exclusive access to sequels that haven’t even been discussed yet. But if InGen is as evil as Jurassic World makes it out to be, surely they could find a nefarious use for big hairy things with tusks and teeth past their knees.
8. Velociraptors Speaking Perfect English
Go ahead and file this under “you’re insane, and this is stupid,” but here it is anyway: if Jurassic World sequels keep pushing the hybrid angle, eventually we’re gonna get a giant reptile with a couple strands of human DNA in there. Or at the bare minimum, one with enough intellect to grunt out a half-formed sentence or two. It sounds beyond idiotic, but you’re probably thinking of talking Velociraptors in a very Jurassic Park III context.
I’m thinking more Rise of the Planet of the Apes. That movie had a talking chimp. Talking chimps are silly, yet Rise of the Planet of the Apes turned chimpanzee English into a stomach-in-your-throat barnburner of a movie scene. It could happen.
(OK fine, it could never happen. But thinking the I. Rex is the upper limit of hybrid dinosaur intellect is just foolish. They will be getting smarter. Mark my words).
