Like a dino hatchling slowly beginning to claw its way out from the egg, Universal’s marketing machine for Jurassic World 2 is just now starting to flicker into life ahead of the sequel’s release in June of 2018.
It’s early, early days, but the past fortnight alone has heralded foreboding promo images and entire posters dedicated to Chris Pratt’s returning Owen Grady, the former Navy veteran who single-handedly managed to tame (?) a posse of Velociraptors two years ago. It remains to be seen what kind of dangers Grady and the rest of the gang will face in Jurassic World 2 – common logic points to another wave of genetically modified dinosaurs and, potentially, InGen creating a loophole in the system that results in open-source dino creation – but now that Juan Antonio Bayona’s monstrous sequel has eased past the halfway point in production, it’s clear that Jurassic World 2 is beginning to coalesce.
Adding fuel to that fire today is a photo of what appears to be the sequel’s official (?) logo. First spotted by Reel News Hawaii (with a tip of the hat to Screen Rant), the image found its way online over the course of the weekend to mark the moment when principal photography wrapped in England. Next stop? The Hawaiian island of Oahu.
And that's a wrap for Jurassic World 2 in England!!!!!! Next stop, Oahu!!! pic.twitter.com/AzFddZ9XK7
— Reel News Hawaii (@reelnewshawaii) May 27, 2017
Meanwhile, the alleged logo retains the style of the original Jurassic Park franchise, when Universal employed claw marks as numerical values. Granted, the studio is yet to confirm whether this is indeed the logo for Jurassic World 2, but if nothing else, it suggests that J.A. Bayona’s follow-up will ditch a subtitle in favor of the number two.
Angled as the second chapter in Universal’s rebooted Jurassic saga, Jurassic World 2 is expected to stomp into theaters on June 22nd, 2018 and in what has become a typical trend for Hollywood sequels, Juan Antonio Bayona’s blockbuster has been championed as a darker, scarier beast.