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Scarlett Johansson’s Jurassic World Movie Can Do Something Both Trilogies Avoided And Finally Fix A Franchise Problem
Jurassic World Rebirth can massively raise the stakes of the Jurassic franchise by killing off a main character during the reboot's first movie.
This new cast is impressive and, crucially, Jurassic World: Rebirth won’t bring back any of the characters seen in earlier Jurassic World and Jurassic Park movies. By the end of 2022’s Jurassic World: Dominion, the franchise’s legacy cameos had become tiresome, and the cast had somehow swollen to include almost a dozen main characters. The news that Jurassic World: Rebirth’s story will be a wholesale reinvention of the franchise is promising, and Universal's synopsis revealing that the planet’s ecology has “Proven lately inhospitable to dinosaurs” means the sequel won’t feel as far-fetched as its predecessor, Jurassic World: Dominion.
Every Jurassic Park Sequel Has A Worse Rotten Tomatoes Score Than Its Predecessor
The Original Jurassic Park Trilogy’s Reception Steadily Declined
That said, Jurassic World: Rebirth will have a hard time salvaging the critical reputation of the series, considering the Jurassic Park movies have been on the decline for over three decades at this point. As shocking as it may sound, a cursory glance over the franchise’s Rotten Tomatoes history proves that the Jurassic Park franchise’s struggles with critics didn’t start with 2015’s Jurassic World. On the contrary, the Jurassic Park franchise had just as hard a time replicating its original success with reviewers, as evidenced by the waning popularity of The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park III.
Jurassic Park | 91% |
The Lost World: Jurassic Park | 53% |
Jurassic Park III | 49% |
Jurassic World | 72% |
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’ | 47% |
Jurassic World: Dominion | 29% |
Jurassic Park boasts an undeniably impressive critical score of 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, but the franchise’s critical acclaim ended with its first outing. Jurassic Park’s ending offered viewers a self-contained standalone story and, even though director Steven Spielberg returned for 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park, critics weren’t convinced that the Michael Crichton adaptation needed a follow-up. The Lost World: Jurassic Park has a rating of only 53% on Rotten Tomatoes, while Jurassic Park III’s rating has a mere 49%. In this context, 2015’s reboot Jurassic World earning a comparatively stellar 72% seems like a return to form.
All Jurassic World Sequels Also Had A Worse Rotten Tomatoes Score Than Their Predecessor
Jurassic World’s Sequels Followed The Same Unfortunate Trend
Sadly, Jurassic World’s critical revival of the franchise was short-lived. Jurassic World’s 72% was far higher than Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’s comparatively paltry 47%, which saw the franchise dip even lower than 2001’s Jurassic Park III had managed. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’s wild ending twist, wherein the heroes of the series released dozens of dinosaurs into the world and they soon cropped up throughout human civilization, left Jurassic World: Dominion with a tricky starting point. The final movie in the new trilogy had to imagine a world wherein dinosaurs and humans co-existed, something that was tough to envision.
The 2022 blockbuster was a huge box office hit, but Jurassic World: Dominion earned a critical rating of only 29%.
Bizarrely, Jurassic World: Dominion attempted to work around this by largely ignoring the twist ending of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and instead focusing on a tale of corporate intrigue involving BioSyn. The result was a bizarre mélange of spy movie antics and dinosaur disaster movies that failed to impress critics upon release. Despite replacing Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom director J.A Bayona with Jurassic World’s returning Colin Trevorrow, Jurassic World: Dominion soon became the franchise’s least critically successful outing so far. The 2022 blockbuster was a huge box office hit, but Jurassic World: Dominion earned a critical rating of only 29%.
Why The Jurassic Park Franchise Struggles So Much With Sequels
Jurassic World and Jurassic Park Were Hard Acts To Follow
Jurassic Park’s sequels struggled because they could not repeat the original movie’s story, and Jurassic World’s later franchise additions fell afoul of a similar problem. Spielberg’s original Jurassic Park focused primarily on the premise of a theme park overrun with dinosaurs, a self-contained sci-fi horror story that had clear stakes. The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park III had to come up with excuses to revisit the island setting, but couldn’t repeat Jurassic Park’s ingeniously simple setup. Jurassic World’s sequels faced much the same issue over two decades later after the reboot’s critical success in 2015.
Jurassic World prioritized the simple “Theme park gone wrong” setup for the first time since Jurassic Park, so it was no surprise when the movie was a critical hit. This premise allows the franchise to comment on the ethical issues of man playing god, the exploitative nature of capitalism, and the comically obvious practical problems with a theme park full of live dinosaurs while keeping its plot self-contained. In contrast, both Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and Jurassic World: Dominion couldn’t simply return to this theme park plot, and both fell apart at a narrative level due to this issue.
How Gareth Edwards’ Jurassic World: Rebirth Can Better Than Previous Sequels
Jurassic World: Rebirth Seems Set To Return The Series To Its Roots
The most promising aspect of Jurassic World: Rebirth’s story is, ironically, its refusal to return to the setup shared by Jurassic Park and Jurassic World. It is good that Jurassic World: Rebirth isn’t a “Theme park gone wrong” story, as the franchise has repeatedly made it clear that it has nowhere to go after a successful standalone cautionary tale. Jurassic World: Rebirth’s plot could be better than the stories of previous sequels if it leans into the darker survival horror aspects of the story and focuses less on the outlandish elements of corporate espionage and dinosaur poaching featured in Jurassic World’s sequels.
By eschewing the over-the-top action of the sequels in favor of straightforward survival horror, the reboot could offer critics something new
The Lost World: Jurassic Park was bogged down by knotty, overly complex plotting, but the sequel was at its strongest when Spielberg’s movie focused on getting stranded survivors off an island teeming with killer dinosaurs. Jurassic World: Rebirth’s plot could revisit this bare-bones setup and provide viewers with the first truly scary Jurassic Park movie since 1993’s original. By eschewing the over-the-top action of the sequels in favor of straightforward survival horror, the reboot could offer critics something new. In doing so, Jurassic World: Rebirth could save the critical reputation of both the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World franchises.
Jurassic World: Rebirth is set to be released on July 2, 2025.
Sources: Universal Pictures
Release Date July 2, 2025
Character(s) Zora Bennett , Duncan Kincaid , Dr. Henry Loomis , Martin Krebs , Reuben Delgado
Director Gareth Edwards
Writers David Koepp , Michael Crichton
Distributor(s) Universal Pictures
English (US) ·