Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp returning for “complete reboot” of the series
Even after every movie in the sequel trilogy made $1 billion, Universal is starting fresh
If the Jurassic Park movies are about mankind’s hubristic insistence on inciting our own obliteration, and the Jurassic World movies are about Hollywood’s hubristic insistence on trying to reclaim the glories of the past (even if those glories will eventually eat you), then what does it say about both humanity and Hollywood that Universal is moving forward with what Deadline says will be a “complete reboot” of the Jurassic Park series? Something damning, certainly, especially since the last Jurassic movie—Jurassic World Dominion—just came out in 2022.
But hey, everyone will always like seeing dinosaur movies, and each entry in the World trilogy made over $1 billion, so why the hell not make more? Universal’s new Jurassic movie will be written by David Koepp, who wrote the screenplay for the first two Jurassic Park movies, and Deadline says that nobody from the previous movies—including Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard from the new ones and Jeff Goldblum, Sam Neill, and Laura Dern from the old ones—is “expected to return.”
That all seems good, since the World movies were so desperately beholden to the Park movies, and there’s no need to make the concept of a dinosaur theme park so limited by keeping it closely tied to what came before. These ideas need to be allowed to run free, chomping lawyers, stalking Robert Muldoon, and spitting on Wayne Knight like they would in the wild.
As for Koepp, he’s had what could be pretty safely described as an interesting career. He’s credited, either solo or with other writers, on Mission: Impossible, David Fincher’s Panic Room, the first Spider-Man movie, Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, Premium Rush, the Da Vinci Code sequels, and Steven Soderbergh’s Presence (the movie that freaked out Sundance this week). Also, he directed (but did not write) Johnny Depp’s Mortdecai, so he’s seen some wild shit. Imagine a dinosaur with a funny little mustache? Now there’s the energy the Jurassic series has been missing.