Why are these dinos creeping around people’s homes? What do they want? How’d they get in there without breaking anything? The trailer for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has a lot of explaining to do.
Universal Pictures released the final trailer for the upcoming Jurassic World sequel yesterday (April 19), and it wildly changed perceptions of what the film is about. Previous trailers focused on Chris Pratt’s expert raptor trainer Owen Grady returning to the infamous dino-infested Isla Nublar for reasons that seemed foggy at best: ostensibly to save the remaining prehistoric creatures from a large volcanic eruption.
But the new trailer makes clear that Grady’s (apparently botched) rescue operation only constitutes the very beginning of the film. From there, he unwittingly helps bring the dinosaurs back to human society, where they do things like chill out on rooftops and lurk outside your bedroom window the way a masked intruder in a home invasion film would.
The horror-film aesthetic of Fallen Kingdom confirms that Universal has sadly chosen not to go with one of our suggestions for the sequel from 2015, which included a pitch in which the dinosaurs enslave and then clone Chris Pratt, opening up a theme park of their own: Chris Pratt World. Fortunately, Universal has already announced plans for a Jurassic World 3 (tentatively slated for June 2021), so there’s still time for the franchise to use our idea.
While “Jurassic Park meets Halloween” may be a silly premise, it’s probably better than the alternative: yet another film that takes place on Isla Nublar, the setting of both Jurassic World and the original Jurassic Park. It makes no sense that humans would continue hanging around the site of so much death and destruction—except, of course, to rescue the dinosaurs and bring them back to populated areas so that they can munch on people in their homes.
Fallen Kingdom looks like it’ll fit in nicely with the recent spate of “creature features,” including Rampage and The Meg—two films featuring extremely large predators wreaking havoc upon humanity. Those films could generously be called Jurassic Park homages, taking the genre to its logical extreme. And the longer the Jurassic World series goes on, the more they resemble its preposterous knock-offs.
Universal is fine with that, so long as the dino flicks still rake in lots of cash. 2015’s Jurassic World made $1.6 billion globally, making it the fourth highest-grossing movie of all time. Fallen Kingdom likely won’t hit that mark, but a billion is still a good bet.