Universal may have only issued the green light a fortnight ago, but already the creative team behind this year’s box office juggernaut have been kicking around ideas for Jurassic World 2.
Chief among those is the one pitched by director Colin Trevorrow – returning to pen the sequel’s script alongside Derek Connolly – who imagines a world where the ability to create and manufacture dinosaurs is no longer proprietary. Up until this point in the timeline, the science of visionary and biological expert John Hammond has largely remained exclusive to entertainment purposes, but as the filmmaker so rightly points out during an interview with Wired, the scenario of a dinosaur rampaging around an island will get old very fast.
Here’s what Trevorrow had to offer up about the early concepts for Jurassic World 2, and how the sequel could incorporate open source dinos into the mix.
“[It will not be] just a bunch of dinosaurs chasing people on an island,” Trevorrow tells the outlet. “That’ll get old real fast….I feel like the idea that this isn’t always going to be limited to theme parks, and there are applications for this science that reach far beyond entertainment. And when you look back at nuclear power and how that started, the first instinct was to weaponise it and later on we found it could be used for energy.
And this isn’t something necessarily that was in the book but is a seed that I wanted to plant in this movie, is that might be able to grow in more of these movies if they decide to make more of them, is: What if this went open source? It’s almost like InGen is Mac, but what if PC gets their hands on it? What if there are 15 different entities around the world who can make a dinosaur?’”
Indeed for Jurassic World, Trevorrow at one point had two genetically modified dinosaurs starring in the film, with the towering Indominus Rex rubbing shoulders with the Stegoceratops. Alas, the latter man-made beast never made it off the floor of the editing room for fear it would undermine the unique aura of the Indominus. Even still, the idea of dinosaur creation extending into various sectors around the globe could produce any number of genetically modified dinos in the follow-up.
“And Dr Wu says in the film, when he’s warning Dr Mesrani, ‘We’re not always going to be the only ones who can make a dinosaur’. I think that’s an interesting idea that even if we don’t explore fully in this film, there is room for this universe to expand. I shouldn’t use the word universe, because people will think we’re making a Jurassic World universe – we’re not.”
Jurassic World 2 has been scheduled for a release on June 22, 2018. Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard will each reprise their roles as Owen Grady and park operations manager Claire Dearing, respectively.