Jurassic World Rebirth is now in theaters, which means the makers of the film finally have a chance to spill some secrets from its production, giving fans insight into how the latest installment in the three-decade-long trilogy took shape.
Among those filmmakers is screenwriter David Koepp, who wrote both Jurassic Park and its first sequel, The Lost World, and returns to the franchise now to inject some new life into the world after the events of Jurassic World Dominion. Without relying too much on the plots of any of the previous Jurassic World films, Koepp devised an idea that focuses heavily on the threat of dinosaurs in the wild, creating a fight for survival that was reflected in the film’s original working title.
Jurassic World Rebirth‘s original title
Pulling events back to a smaller scale than the previous Jurassic World films, Koepp imagined another lost island full of dinosaurs — in this case the site of a former InGen research facility where both natural and mutated dinosaurs roam free — and decided to send two groups of people, a covert ops team and a shipwrecked family, into the fray alongside those dinos. In the world of Rebirth, dinosaurs are gone from civilization, settling inside in equatorial zones with a climate that allows them survive, because they quite simply can’t in the far North or far South of the world.
The dinosaurs are fighting for their existence, while the humans are on a hunt for dinosaur DNA samples that could product a lifesaving drug. All that, plus the film’s ability to launch a slew of dinosaur attacks from virtually anywhere in the environment, suggested a very simple but potent title.
“The working title of the script was Survival,” Koepp told The Hollywood Reporter. “I wanted to keep my eye very much on that with every single character fighting to survive once they get to the island. And the animals, of course, are fighting to survive. So when you got that going for you, don’t need to goose it. These are people trying to not die. That’s a big story.”
Though Universal Pictures eventually settled on the Rebirth title, it’s important to remember Koepp’s preferred scripting name in the context of this story, particularly through scenes when characters discuss what they want with the rest of their lives, and what their lives mean in the context of a vast cosmic calendar that already saw dinosaurs go extinct once. Survival is always key to a Jurassic Park film, and not everyone makes it out, but this film in particular wanted some added emphasis, and despite the title chance, it’s still there in the story
Jurassic World Rebirth is in theaters now. Get tickets at Fandango.
