Following two lackluster sequels to the 1993 classic Jurassic Park, dinosaur fans were finally treated to the sequel they deserved in this year's Colin Trevorrow-directed Jurassic World. It wasn't a perfect film by any means, but it was good enough to restore moviegoers' faith in a dying franchise, while earning Universal Pictures a cool $1.6 billion at the global box office (via boxofficemojo). With fans finally excited about dinosaurs again, Universal Pictures is ready to push out more Jurassic World films. And in the recent Jurassic Cast, director Colin Trevorrow talked a bit about the future of the franchise, including Jurassic World 2.
“Honestly, the trilogy is articulated in Jurassic Park, it’s all in there… Jurassic World is all based on Ian Malcolm’s quote, ‘You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you wanna sell it.’ That to me is Jurassic World, that’s why I had all the product placement, that’s what it was," Trevorrow said, before touching on its upcoming sequel which he is penning the script to.
"The second one, Jurassic World 2, and as we were driving we tried to find, what is the foundation? ‘Dinosaurs and man, separated by 65 million years of evolution have been thrown back into the mix together. How can we know what to expect?’ That’s why it’s exciting that the movie did well, that leaves us a lot of room to run, and it was part of this design, it had a beginning, middle, and end when we wrote the first movie. Now that the movie did well, we get to play that out.”
Trevorrow stressed that Jurassic World 2 will be "a different kind of film," explaining "The audience has given us permission to a certain extent to take this to the next level, and I don’t necessarily mean in scale."
Putting at least my worries that a sequel will undo everything Jurassic World restored, Trevorrow said "I feel very strongly that it’s not about more dinosaurs or bigger and better dinosaurs, it’s about using this as a starting point for a much larger story about our relationship with these animals and about animals in general and the dynamic created by bringing them back to life."
"Jurassic World was very much made with the fans in mind, and I’m not going to forget it, but now we’ve seen a lot of ‘dinosaurs chasing people around on an island’ movies. I think you guys and also the general audience is going to be down to explore where else we can go," he continued. Despite the popularity of Jurassic World, there was criticism that it was pretty much the same premise as the original, but on a larger scale. While we don't know the details, it sounds like Trevorrow is looking to explore other ideas. I just hope they don't go too overboard. I don't know about you, but the first thought I had following Jurassic World was "How can they top this without ruining it?"
On the plus side, Jurassic World 2 will benefit from the return of Chris Pratt (Owen) and Bryce Dallas Howard (Claire); however, Trevorrow revealed "neither will be in the same place that we left them in this movie."
"Even though Claire is the one who evolves the most over the trilogy, it’s her story that mirrors this changing world, Owen has s**t to deal with," he explained. "The two of them opened Pandora’s Box in Jurassic World and each of them are responsible for different elements of it in different ways, and I think the way that these characters are connected to the circumstances of what’s happening it’s different than the previous films. It’s not ‘Let’s manufacture a way to get them somewhere,’ they’re embedded into it now in a way that as story tellers makes it much easier for us to keep them involved and doesn’t feel as contrived.”
You can listen to Trevorrow's full interview on Jurassic Cast below.
