Clocking in as the second longest of the Jurassic World films, director Gareth Edwards’ Jurassic World Rebirth (now in theaters; get tickets here) is a substantial 133 minutes of ruthless dinosaur danger set on the forgotten InGen research outpost, Ile Saint-Hubert.
A reset in terms of the life and death stakes that come when humans interact with wild dinosaurs, Jurassic World Rebirth also adds in the novel twist of the island being the last bastion of all of InGen’s failed dinosaur experiments. Intending to engineer more entertaining dinosaurs for their Isla Nublar theme park, InGen scientists tried mutating the genes between species, with deadly results (see the Distortus rex).
Across the franchise history of the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World films (the previous films are now streaming on Peacock), there’s a common history of footage that just didn’t fit into the theatrical cut for many reasons. SYFY WIRE recently asked Edwards if fans could expect a future director’s cut of Jurassic World Rebirth, and if so, what we should expect.
Director Gareth Edwards confirms two bonus scenes for Jurassic World Rebirth
Because Edwards only had about 18 months to shoot and post Jurassic World Rebirth, he said that he stayed within the parameters of screenwriter David Koepp and executive producer Steven Spielberg‘s well-developed ideas for the film.
“It’s always been my ambition to deliver a director’s cut which was under two hours,” Edwards told us about his intended theatrical cut of the film. “So, the first cut I ever did was 1 hour 59 minutes, or something like that. Then the only [big] note of the studio was, ‘Cool. Can you put in the five minutes you cut out?'”
Edwards said he and his editor Jabez Olssen restored those five minutes back into the theatrical cut and that’s the movie audiences can now see in theaters.
Part of the final post production process is providing extra material to the home video team so they can put together extra features, or even a director’s cut for physical media and streaming versions of the film. “They came up and said we need some DVD extras, have you got any deleted scenes? And I said, ‘I think we’ve got two moments,’ so there’s two on the extras. But there’s not much. There wasn’t much on the cutting room floor, to be honest. It was more about compression and intercutting.”
Recently, Edwards expanded on the specifics of the extras to Gizmodo. He pointed to a sequence in the third act in front of a gas station that had a “hunted” vibe for the humans involved. “It was a note from David Koepp, which was essentially, the third act, if you give it a name, it would be ‘Run like hell,'” Edwards detailed. “And so basically once they started running, it was like, don’t make them stop. And it felt like it stopped again. And so we removed that idea, those beats, and it got a lot better. But I do really like what happened in the bit where they did stop. And that will be on the extras.”
Jurassic World Rebirth is now in theaters everywhere! Click here for tickets! Catch up on the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World trilogies, now streaming on Peacock.
