Jurassic World's Colin Trevorrow admits "There probably should have only been one Jurassic Park"
The Jurassic World and Dominion director dubbed the series "inherently unfranchisable" in a recent interview
Few people have profited more obviously from Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park—and its subsequent franchise of films—than director Colin Trevorrow. It was, after all, Trevorrow’s 2015 revival project Jurassic World that launched him from an up-and-coming indie director with one minor hit to his name (2012's Safety Not Guaranteed), into a verifiable blockbuster sensation. So it’s interesting to hear Trevorrow state, in a new interview tied to his latest franchise sequel, Jurassic World: Dominion, that “There probably should have only been one Jurassic Park.”
This is per an interview with Empire, in which Trevorrow openly admits that Spielberg’s original movie is “inherently unfranchisable.” (A principle that Spielberg himself started testing, to mixed results, with The Lost World in 1997.) Which, obviously, didn’t stop Universal from trying—or Trevorrow from taking his own cracks at it, first in 2015 with World, and then in 2022 with Dominion. Which was at least a stab at something new for the series, he says: “I specifically did something different than the other films in order to change the DNA of the franchise. The previous five films are plots about dinosaurs. This one is a story about characters in a world in which they coexist with dinosaurs.”
Released back in June, Dominion was a whiff with critics but fared considerably better with audiences, eventually creeping just barely over the vaunted $1 billion box office line. (It’s the second-highest performer of the year worldwide, although Top Gun: Maverick comfortably blew past it a few weeks later.) Trevorrow, for his part, also confesses that he was surprised at some of the movie’s advertising, noting that, “I never knew that this was the ending of the franchise until I saw the marketing.” Noting that he went out of his way, while making the film, to weave in potential new characters and paths for a sequel, Trevorrow pointed out the absurdity of thinking a film series like this will ever just stop at this point: “Because regardless of the cynical approach—of course they’re gonna want to make more money, which is what Jurassic World was about—a new dinosaur fan is born every day.”