Films and Fiction

It’s hard to think of a franchise that’s as bankrupt, tired and irrelevant as Jurassic World. In the last ten years, this IP has been flanderized into extinction, turned into a parody of Michael Crichton’s work, and yet it still continues to be exploited again and again.

Now the news has come out that Gareth Edwards, director of Jurassic World: Rebirth will not be returning for the eighth movie. It’s a signal that you’re in serious trouble, when one of the most safe, corporate directors out there has “creative differences” with the studio. After all, Edwards brought out such average movies as Godzilla (2014) and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. While both are entertaining, they hardly set the world alight, and you can see the imprint of corporate fingers on them both. Even his own original movie The Creator from 2023 failed to do anything new, rolling out a tired plot about artificial intelligence that never quite said anything of value.

Rebirth itself was a kit-built movie, with that algorithmic quality that seemed to have measured out exactly what quantities of pseudoscience, loud action, and obnoxious characters a Jurassic World movie needs to please fans.

The reported JW8 also sees David Koepp return to write. His name has been attached to some great things in the past, not least the original Jurassic Park, but he seems to have lost his touch, and had no embarrassment in attaching his name to Rebirth. If that was the best he could do after thirty years away from the franchise, I doubt his second attempt will be any better.

The most surprising thing is how long this franchise has managed to hang around. It’s a perfect example of diminishing returns. When the reboot arrived in 2015, it was a huge success, with over $1.6 billion at the box office and shifting tons of merch. In the ten years since, each entry has incrementally reduced that, until the most recent which made a mere $870 million.

It’s been a model of diminishing quality too. Jurassic Park was an incredible movie in so many ways: exceptional quality, a triumph of visual effects and innovation, but also a smart script that rewards you on rewatches. You can slowly unwrap it to reveal its cautionary tale of scientific recklessness, corporate irresponsibility, the exploitation of the natural world, and our inability to keep nature under control. It’s classic science fiction.

The new movies seem only to be a cautionary tale against exploiting a franchise. The only depth to them is the depth of their destruction and stupidity. They’ve become caricature of themselves: every lesson of the original twisted back upon itself to become an intrinsic part of them, yet no one at the studio appreciates the irony, as they continue to exploit the IP, with every new film destroying the very base on which they were built, and ruining any chance to rebuild something better.

If John Hammond had created the franchise, he would likely be appalled by what it’s become. The exploitation of it, the fake flea circus run by Universal.

This new delay is the perfect time for the franchise to be laid to rest. What can they expect, after all, from the next movie, except that it will be less successful, make less money, sell less toys, and lose more fans, making it even more irrelevant.

Perhaps the best thing we can hope is that it flops so badly that the studio will think twice about making any more of them. I think after four movies of such regressive quality, we can assume it’s not going to get better any time soon.