Universal Pictures surprised us back in January when they announced that not only was a new entry in the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World franchise in the works, but the screenplay was already finished and the project was aiming for a 2025 theatrical release. July 2, 2025, to be exact. This new movie is called Jurassic World Rebirth, and it was assembled in a mad scramble so it can stay on track to reach theatres next July. Details have been kept under wraps so far, but Universal just revealed some plot and character information the other day, so now it’s time for us to put together a list of Everything We Know About Jurassic World Rebirth:
PLOT
One of the most interesting things about this new Jurassic movie is the fact that it boasts a script written by original Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp, returning to the franchise for the first time since The Lost World: Jurassic Park. After sitting out the last four movies, Koepp has come back to tell the following story: Five years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion, the planet’s ecology has proven largely inhospitable to dinosaurs. Those remaining exist in isolated equatorial environments with climates resembling the one in which they once thrived. The three most colossal creatures within that tropical biosphere hold the key to a drug that will bring miraculous life-saving benefits to humankind. This action-packed new chapter in the franchise sees an intrepid team racing to secure DNA samples from the three most colossal creatures across land, sea and air.
To make sure they get the dinosaur action just right, the studio has hired paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Steve Brusatte to be the dinosaur expert consultant on the film. That’s a job Brusatte also had on the previous movie, where he was consultant alongside paleontologist Jack Horner, who has been a consultant on all six Jurassic movies to date. It’s not clear if Horner is back for this one, or if he has fully passed the torch to Brusatte.
Speaking on The Discourse podcast, Koepp said, “I hope people like the movie because the series tended to change after three, and it felt like, ‘Okay, so let’s change our tone.’ Steven [Spielberg] and I were interested in a tone that was maybe more akin to the very first movie. I saw it early on as a mission movie. I like things that are driven by bottles, by containment, you know? And so, developing a limited team and a thing that they have to accomplish – that was all really fun. And it was just fun to return to that world of great adventure backed by real science and write some cool new characters. You don’t often get a chance to have a blank slate and say, ‘What do you want to do?’ There were no franchise expectations other than dinosaurs.“
Koepp told Variety, “The first two movies were two of my favorite experiences ever. And Steven said, ‘What about starting over? Let’s try something all new.’ I said, ‘Oh, that’s a cool idea. What if blah, blah, blah,’ and then I threw an idea back. That’s it. It caught. You do that all the time with your friends and collaborators: throw ideas back and forth. And sometimes they catch, usually they don’t. There is pressure because it’s going to cost a lot of money and there are going to be big expectations and blah, blah, blah. But there was no pressure at first — just the pursuit of our ideas.” Koepp was working from novels written by Michael Crichton on the first two movies, and said, “I reread the two novels to get myself back in that mode though. We did take some things from them. There was a sequence from the first novel that we’d always wanted in the original movie, but didn’t have room for. We were like, ‘Hey, we get to use that now.’ But just to get back in that head space 30 years later — is it still fun? And the answer is yes, it still really is. Dinosaurs are still fun.“
DIRECTOR
The two biggest franchises at Universal are the Jurassic movies and the Fast & Furious series – so it makes sense that when the studio needed to get a director attached to Jurassic World Rebirth as quickly as possible, they first turned to a filmmaker with Fast & Furious experience: David Leitch, who directed the Fast & Furious spin-off Hobbs & Shaw for them. Leitch also worked with Universal on The Fall Guy, which was about to be released when they started talking to him about making their latest dinosaur movie. But the deal was only in the “early negotiations” phase when Leitch and Universal came to realize they had different ideas about the direction of the project. So Leitch stepped away and less than two weeks later Universal found a different director who has experience with both blockbusters and giant creatures: Gareth Edwards, the director of Monsters, Godzilla, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and The Creator.
Edwards signed on at the end of February, with filming set to begin at the start of June.
Edwards told Empire, “It goes back to what I loved about the original, with an embarrassment of riches of different set-piece-type scenarios and tense, fun action moments. There were a lot of opportunities as a filmmaker to have a lot of fun and try and play games with the audience.” The movie will be packed with the dinosaurs movie-goers are hoping to see, as “there are certain dinosaurs it would be a crime against cinema not to include.”
After filming had wrapped, Edwards told Entertainment Weekly about the filming locations: “I’m allowed to say this now that we’re on the other side of it, but we shot in rivers and these mangrove swamps. When we were scouting them, we saw poisonous water snakes, massive ones that we had to catch. We kept it quiet from the actors as they spent a whole day wading through the same area. And there were giant spiders that were poisonous and stuff on the edge of the trees. You just wouldn’t point them out if you saw them. Just keep going!“
CAST
This new Jurassic World movie won’t be featuring any returning lead characters from the previous Jurassic Park / Jurassic World movies. The characters played by Sam Neill, Jeff Goldblum, and Laura Dern are out, as are the ones played by Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard. But this project didn’t have time for an extended casting process, so Edwards and Universal started reaching out to known names and making them offers. Colman Domingo (Fear the Walking Dead) and Dev Patel (Monkey Man) were said to be on the wish list at one point, but they didn’t end up being cast. Glen Powell (Twisters) was offered a role, but turned it down, saying, “Jurassic is one of my favorite movies. It’s one of the things I’ve wanted to do my whole life. I’m not doing that movie because I read the script and I immediately was like, my presence in this movie doesn’t help it. And the script’s great. The movie’s going to kill. It’s not about that. It’s about choosing where you’re going to make an audience happy and where you’re going to make yourself happy.“
Actors who did accept offers include Scarlett Johansson (The Avengers), Mahershala Ali (Green Book), Jonathan Bailey (Bridgerton), Rupert Friend (Obi-Wan Kenobi), and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (The Lincoln Lawyer). Luna Blaise (Manifest), on the other hand, did have to (according to Deadline) “beat out a number of actors” to land her role. David Iacono of The Summer I Turned Pretty, child actress Audrina Miranda, Philippine Velge (Station Eleven), Béchir Sylvain (Diarra from Detroit), and Ed Skrein (Deadpool) are also in the cast.
Speaking to Variety, Johansson said she took the job because, “I am an enormous Jurassic Park fan. It is one of the first movies I remember seeing in theaters. I remember it so vividly. It was life-changing and mind-blowing. I cannot express how excited I am. The script is so incredible. David Koepp wrote it and returned after 30 years to write it and he’s so passionate about it. I’ve been trying to get into this franchise in any possible way for over 10 years. I’m like, ‘I’ll die in the first five minutes! I can get eaten by whatever! I’ll do the craft service!’ I’ll do anything for it. The fact that it’s happened in this way at this time just is actually unbelievable.” Bailey told V Magazine, “I’m on a really long holiday in the jungle, pretending to run away from fake dinosaurs… Um, no, I’m filming Jurassic Park. I can say that it’s written by David Koepp, who wrote the original. It feels like it’s in ultimate hands to bring it back to what the original achieved. (Jurassic Park) was the first film I went to see with my whole family, and I was way too young, I was terrified.“
Jurassic franchise veteran Jeff Goldblum, who worked with Johansson on Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, gave her this piece of advice: “Don’t get eaten, unless you want to. I love you.“
The director took the opportunity to build up Johansson’s character while talking to Empire, saying, “She’s looking for meaning in her life after leaving the military, and this opportunity comes along where [after it] basically she’d never have to work again. But through that journey, she starts to question the ethical rights and wrongs of what they’re doing.“
CHARACTERS
A press release sent out by Universal revealed that Johansson plays “skilled covert operations expert Zora Bennett, contracted to lead a skilled team on a top-secret mission to secure genetic material from the world’s three most massive dinosaurs. When Zora’s operation intersects with a civilian family whose boating expedition was capsized by marauding aquatic dinos, they all find themselves stranded on an island where they come face-to-face with a sinister, shocking discovery that’s been hidden from the world for decades.”
Ali’s character is Duncan Kincaid, Zora’s most trusted team leader. Bailey is playing paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis, with Friend as Big Pharma representative Martin Krebs and Garcia-Rulfo as Reuben Delgado, the father of the shipwrecked civilian family. Blaise, Iacono, and Miranda play Reuben’s family, with Velge, Sylvain, and Skrein playing members of Zora and Krebs’ crews.
Bailey told Empire that the upcoming sequel is a “love letter” to the original Jurassic Park. “It really does feel that it’s welcoming people to really celebrate the original film,” he said. “It has that wonder and awe, while not being scared to re-inject the thrill and the fear.” Scarlett Johansson agrees. “It hearkens back to the first one,” she said. “It has a lot of good jump-scares, and the stakes are high.“
While the Jurassic World trilogy explored what would happen if the dinosaurs entered our world, Rebirth wants to return to their habitat. “We wanted to recapture the idea that we are in the dinosaurs’ environment,” said screenwriter David Koepp. “The last few movies were exploring the idea of, ‘Hey, what would it be like if they were in our environment?’ They did that very well, and now we wanted to explore how it felt to go back to theirs.“
PRODUCTION
Jurassic World Rebirth started filming in Thailand on June 13th and the production stayed there through July 16th, with locations including Bangkok, Trang, Phang Nga, Phuket, Chiang Mai and the Huai To Waterfall, which is within the Khao Phanom Bencha National Park in Krabi province. Filming at the waterfall is believed to have taken a full week. Outside of Thailand, the movie has been filming at studios in Malta and the U.K. Through equipment rentals, accommodation, venue hire, transportation, and catering services, the production was expected to bring $18 million of economic benefit to Thailand. It was also expected to seek local subsidy through Thailand’s 20% production spending rebate system. That system is open to international productions that spend more than $2.75 million in the country.
The film is being produced by Frank Marshall and Patrick Crowley, both longtime Jurassic franchise producers. They also produced this summer’s blockbuster Twisters together. Steven Spielberg, Denis L. Stewart, and Jim Spencer serve as executive producers. At the end of September, Marshall took to Instagram to announce that production has wrapped:
The press release for this film opens with the line, “A new era is born.” It goes on to say that the movie will evolve the series “in an ingenious new direction.” We’ll get to see exactly what that direction is next summer.
Speaking with Vanity Fair, Marshall said the goal with this new movie was to make the dinosaurs feel dangerous again. “You’re in a new place, you don’t know what’s around the corner. You’ve got a different jungle, you’ve got more water, you’ve got higher cliffs. There’s a little bit of everything that’s scary.” He added that some of the dinosaurs that exist in this setting, an island near the equator that was once home to first Jurassic Park’s research lab, are “the dinosaurs that didn’t work. There’s some mutations in there. They’re all based on real dinosaur research, but they look a little different.“
For the design of one mutant dinosaur, Edwards drew inspiration from Alien, Return of the Jedi, and, of course, the original Jurassic Park. He said, “Some Rancor went in there, some H.R. Giger went in there, a little T. rex went in there…” He went on to say that he feels “Jurassic Park is a horror film in the witness protection program. Most people don’t think of it like that. We all went to see it as kids. But I was scared shitless, to be honest, when I was at the cinema watching the T. rex attack. It’s one of the most well-directed scenes in cinema history, so the bar’s really high to come on board and try and do this.“ The mutants are known as the D-Rex and Mutadons. Edwards told Empire that the six-limbed D-Rex is “kind of like if the T-Rex was designed by H.R. Giger, and then that whole thing had sex with a Rancor. It’s a design that I was really happy with; I’d like to buy the toy of it when it comes out.” ILM’s David Vickery added, “It’s as if another animal has been wrapped around the T-Rex. Gareth wanted us to feel sorry for it as well as terrified, because its deformities have caused it some pain, and there’s an encumbrance to it.“ As for the winged Mutadons, Koepp said they’re “a combination of a pterosaur and a Raptor. Those came from my strange mind. We saw in some of the previous Jurassic World movies that their experiments made dinosaurs bigger, meaner, scarier, and it occurred to me and Steven [Spielberg] that those can’t all have gone well.“
As mentioned above, Koepp has previously teased that a sequence from Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park that didn’t fit into the original movie has made its way into Jurassic World Rebirth, and Marshall confirmed that it is, as fans have speculated, a sequence in which characters “attempt to drift through a lagoon in a rubber raft without waking a slumbering Tyrannosaurus rex. They don’t succeed, and end up paddling for their lives.” Koepp is also the one who came up with the story idea that “dinosaurs (are) passé now. People were tired of them. They were an inconvenience. People weren’t going to museums to see them or to petting zoos. They were just in the way. And the climate was not conducive to their survival, so they were starting to pass away and get sick. But there was one area around the equator that had the perfect climate and temperature and environment for them. … A company that [Rupert Friend’s character] represents discovers a way to cure heart disease, but you need the DNA from the three largest dinosaurs on land, sea, and air. Those three dinosaurs exist on this island where they were first created, but it’s a no-go zone.“
While bringing the concept to the screen, Edwards made sure to keep the works of Spielberg in mind. “To me, it’s like a heist movie that meets all the films of Steven Spielberg I loved growing up. The three films we were orbiting were Jaws, Indiana Jones, and the awe and wonder of the original Jurassic.” The Indiana Jones inspiration really comes through in a sequel where Bailey’s Dr. Loomis is trying to extract fluid from the eggs of flying dinosaurs. In the script, this sequence was set in a cave on a cliff. Edwards changed the setting: “The original script just referenced the nest in a cliff and I really felt like we’re in Central America, and I like the idea that there was an old civilization here at one point. (The setting became) an Inca-style old temple that had been abandoned hundreds of thousands of years ago. Inevitably, the second you do that, you’re suddenly going, ‘This is very Indiana Jones.’”
The score is being composed by Alexandre Desplat, who talked to Entertainment Weekly about paying homage to John Williams with his score. Desplat stated, “Every score John Williams has written has become an iconic score, so it’s quite a daunting task.” The composer of the Harry Potter movies and The Shape of Water continued to say, “At first, you’re excited, then panic comes along because you realize that you’re taking over from a fabulous composer who invented so many great things that the whole planet knows. You try to find your way through that.” For Rebirth, Desplat says he tried to balance making something new, while using “quotes of John’s music.”
He added, “You try to make it your own, and at the same time, pay homage to Williams’ music, and try to find your own way through that by inventing new themes and ideas, but staying in the same artistic zone as the scores of the franchise.” Jurassic World Rebirth director Gareth Edwards gave his own statement to EW, saying, “Like the epic dinosaurs in our film, Alexandre is the last of his kind, a rare species with the talent and knowledge to orchestrate his own classical scores. If studios could clone him, they would. Until science finds a way, I’ll happily settle for those goosebump-inducing memories of hearing his music at Abbey Road as he conducted a one-hundred-piece orchestra for our ‘little’ Jurassic movie. Chills.”
To let us know that the first trailer for Jurassic World Rebirth would be released on February 5th, Universal unveiled this quick glimpse of footage on February 3rd:
Then, the trailer arrived:
Here’s a behind-the-scenes promo:
And another trailer:
Jurassic World: Rebirth has been rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of violence/action, bloody images, some suggestive references, language and a drug reference.” And that’s everything we know about it… for now.
Arrow in the Head
