Is The Neo-Jurassic Age The Future Of The Jurassic Park / World Franchise?

Thursday, March 4, 2021

With the recent release of season 2 of Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous on Netflix, the opening of the brand new “Jurassic World VelociCoaster” this summer at Universal’s Islands of Adventure, and the sixth film in the franchise “Jurassic World: Dominion” scheduled for release June 10, 2022, there’s no doubt the franchise has been and will continue to be booming with new content for quite some time. But what clues can we find about the future of the Jurassic Park / World franchise?

Dominion was originally slated to be released this June, but like many other movies, the release was pushed back due to COVID-19. Since we have a solid year to go until its release, not much information has been released regarding the plot, but we do have a general sense of where the next installment is taking us.

Toward the end of the previous film, “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom”, we saw dinosaurs (and their DNA) that had been saved from Isla Nublar’s destruction being sold to the highest bidders and shipped out around the world. The dinosaurs that didn’t end up being sold were then released en masse into the California wilderness by the film’s protagonists to prevent their extinction. This marks the beginning of a “new age”, as its put by Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcom in the film’s closing speech, which gives a new meaning to the words “Jurassic World”, a world where dinosaurs and humans must learn to coexist.

In Fallen Kingdom’s end credits scene we see a shot of a pair of pteranodons perching atop the Eiffel Tower at the Paris hotel in Las Vegas. But this isn’t the last we’ve seen of the new Neo-Jurassic age, the Jurassic World YouTube channel has since released multiple new stories in the new world, starting with a “motion comic” series following a reporter who goes into more detail about the specific situations depicted at the end of fallen kingdom, including the T-Rex seen breaking into a zoo, the Pteranodons in Vegas, and the Mosasaurus seen under the waves of a bustling beach.

But even more epic than the motion comics was a live-action short film titled “Battle at Big Rock”, which depicts an epic battle between an naustoceratops and an allosaurus in a California national park as a family of campers try and survive the confrontation. During the credits of this short, we also see some shots of dinosaurs causing chaos around the world. Definitely give this short a watch if you haven’t already.

Now that we’re all caught up, let’s talk the future of the franchise. Sure VelociCoaster is opening about a year before Dominion comes out, and while we don’t know for certain that the coaster’s story won’t take place after the events of Fallen Kingdom, we believe they’ll most likely take place in the park on Isla Nublar sometime before the park’s failure. (This is assuming they don’t have some new story incorporating Islands of Adventure’s original story of a successful attempt at an operating Jurassic Park on “Isla Aventura” into the universe of Jurassic World, but I digress.) 
Plus there’ll be season three of Camp Cretaceous, which could potentially be released before Dominion. The Netflix show’s story was left open ended yet again, and presumably has to come to a close before the events of Fallen Kingdom since the island is eventually going to be engulfed in a massive volcanic eruption.

So where exactly is Dominion headed? Let’s start with everything we know for certain about the upcoming film. Of course actors Bryce Dallas Howard, Chris Pratt, Isabella Sermon, and BD Wong will be returning as Claire, Owen, Maisie, and Dr. Wu. And the original Jurassic Park characters Alan, Ellie, and Ian, portrayed by their original actors Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum, will finally be reunited. Amidst the return of a very large supporting cast, a notable character is that of Lewis Dodgson, the Biosyn spy that hired Dennis Nedry to steal the embryos back in the original Jurassic Park movie, and ultimately caused the park’s downfall. 

We’ve seen from set leaks online that the Biosyn company is returning in a big way, with images of lab coats, trucks, and even airplanes being seen with the corporation’s logo stamped on them. Newer Jurassic merchandise can be found with snowy mountains seen behind dinosaurs, emphasizing that dinosaurs can be found all over the world, in all climates. 

Our newest piece of speculation and the thing that sparked the writing of this article is a new collection of Jurassic World T-shirts from Uniqlo, many of the shirts depict the franchise’s most popular dinos accompanied by quotes from Jurassic World, and a series of illustrations of robotic dinosaurs by artist Hajime Sorayama. But two of the shirts stand out in particular. They talk about spotting dinosaurs in the wild, and mention an organization we’ve never seen before. The shirt says “Brought to you by The Dinosaur Transitional Integration Authority” circling the classic T-rex Skeleton we all know as the symbol of the franchise. Could this be a new organization to deal with the transition to a new way of life? It also says to report your findings to the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife, could the “DTIA” be a subset of that U.S. government department? 

The other shirt merely states “Protect and preserve local dinosaur wildlife. Let ’em roam. Local outreach.” Sounds like perhaps the Dinosaur Protection Group or “DPG” that much of Fallen Kingdom’s merchandise was centered around may have branched out and has begun advocating for dinosaur wellbeing even in the wild? Or maybe this is yet another statement from the new “DTIA”? (Or maybe we’re just looking way too hard into some new shirt designs.)

Whether the film centers around the rounding up of the world’s newly released dinosaurs, a fight against a greedy corporation that wants the newfound genetic power all to themselves, the straight-up chaos of a world where humans must live alongside prehistoric beasts, or some combination of these, the one thing we know for certain is that the Neo-Jurassic age is filled with a ton of storytelling potential.

Let’s hope the departure from the theme park roots of the story doesn’t take too much away from the franchise. After all, now that dinosaurs are all over the world, what’s stopping every park from becoming one that’s running rampant with the beauty and danger that are dinosaurs. Here’s to many more stories and the future of the Jurassic Park / World franchise.

Source: https://attractionsmagazine.com/