Gareth Edwards’ Jurassic World Rebirth (now in theaters; get tickets here) certainly has its share of nods to the franchise’s past, including the original Jurassic Park (the first two Jurassic trilogies are now streaming on Peacock), but according to Edwards, he almost opened Rebirth with a direct reference that ended up on the cutting room floor.
The new film’s story, written by original Jurassic Park adapter David Koepp, steers new characters to a new location for an all-new dinosaur adventure largely removed from the events of previous films, but because it’s the same world, Rebirth is peppered with callbacks. Watch closely and you’ll see everything from a banner echoing the original park to a T. Rex scene from Michael Crichton’s original novel that didn’t make the first movie’s final cut. But there were more ideas for homages that ended up on the cutting room floor, including a scene that would’ve changed the way the movie opened.
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The original opening for Jurassic World Rebirth
Speaking to Vanity Fair about the way the film took shape, Edwards explained that Steven Spielberg, the franchise originator who remains its executive producer, wanted the new film to steer clear of too many callbacks to things that came before, preferring instead to keep things as new and fresh as possible. That meant that Edwards had to jettison a few ideas, including his first shot.
In the finished film, we open on an InGen laboratory on Île Saint-Hubert, then quickly transition into a breakout and attack by the new island’s most terrifying creature, the mutated D. Rex. According to Edwards, that prologue scene was always part of the plan, but it originally started even further back. Like the original Jurassic Park, Edwards wanted to open on trees in the jungle swaying menacingly. In the original film, Jurassic Park workers are watching the trees and waiting for the arrival of a forklift carrying a massive Velociraptor cage, but Edwards was aiming for an amusing fake-out.
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“The opening of the movie used to start with these primates watching, the trees are moving, and there are some monsters there,” Edwards explained. “It turns out, it’s a giant digger destroying the rainforest. They’re building the laboratory in the middle of the jungle, and then the prologue begins.”
So, Edwards wanted to take viewers back even further in Saint-Hubert’s history, to show InGen first putting down roots, then jump ahead to show the D.Rex attack that eventually led to InGen abandoning the site. It’s a relatively small tweak in the grand scheme of things, but it ended up echoing Jurassic Park a little too closely. So it was trimmed, and instead we got straight into the laboratory hijinks gone horribly wrong.
Other Spielberg homages, though, got to stay, including the scene in which Zora (Scarlett Johansson) and Henry (Jonathan Bailey) infiltrate the nest of a massive Quetzalcoatlus to take a sample from one of its eggs. Edwards positioned the nest inside a temple complex embedded in a high cliff, and when it came time for Henry to lift up one of the eggs, the lighting and the imagery was unmistakably a nod to Raiders of the Lost Ark.
“One of David Koepp’s favorite films is Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Edwards said. “So he was never going to fight me about that.”
Jurassic World Rebirth is now playing in theaters everywhere. Get tickets at Fandango, and stream the original Jurassic Park and its sequels on Peacock!
