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Credit: Universal PicturesThe Jurassic franchise has never shied away from tampering with genetic engineering.
While the science established in the original 1993 film laid the groundwork for the two subsequent sequels, The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) and Jurassic Park III (2001), allowing them to focus on rescue missions and dino-related terror, Jurassic World (2015) returned to the labs, cooking up the franchise’s first dino-hybrid with the Indominus Rex.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) followed suit, giving us a smaller but equally deadly hybrid named the Indoraptor.
While the latest sequel, Jurassic World Dominion (2022), opted for a more back-to-basics approach with its dinosaurs, it still, as Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) would put it, “wielded genetic power like a kid that’s found his dad’s gun,” giving us a swarm of giant, lab-made prehistoric locusts that threatened the world’s ecosystem.
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Now, the upcoming Jurassic World Rebirth (2025), which is the seventh film in the series and is billed as the start of “a new Jurassic era,” is set to return to the tone and realism of the original 1993 film, according to screenwriter David Koepp (who penned the first two films) by doing away with the more outlandish nature of the last three Jurassic World movies.
Additionally, in a recent interview with Empire, director Gareth Edwards (responsible for 2014’s Godzilla) heavily implied that the new film will focus on more authentic dinosaurs and not dino-hybrids, “There’s something kind of mythical about dinosaurs, yet real, you know?” he said.
“The fact that they really did exist means you can’t dismiss them as a threat. When other films try to scare you, you can fob them off and say, ‘Well, there’s no such thing as monsters.’ But there’s something very primal about dinosaurs, because we’re mammals with millions of years of embedded instinct that tells us some giant creature at some point is going to chase us and try and kill us. So it feels instantly relatable.”
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With that said, the official synopsis shared by Universal Pictures earlier this year promises a “sinister, shocking discovery that’s been kept hidden from the world for decades.” Naturally, fans have been gravitating towards a theory that involves dinosaur-human hybrids, but the twist could be far more, well, “sinister” and “shocking” than we first thought.
Set five years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion, the film follows skilled covert operations expert Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), who’s sent on a top-secret mission to secure DNA from the world’s three most massive dinosaurs.
However, when her team crosses paths with a civilian family whose boating expedition was capsized by underwater dinosaurs, “they all find themselves stranded on an island where they come face-to-face with a sinister, shocking discovery that’s been hidden from the world for decades.”
While there’s no telling what this massive twist might be, it could involve seeing a certain character brought back to life. As far-fetched as that might seem, the franchise is no stranger to throwing human clones into the mix: Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon) certainly divided the fanbase when she was introduced in Fallen Kingdom.
Now, Rebirth might be set to do something similar by bringing back InGen CEO John Hammond, who was played by the late Richard Attenborough in Jurassic Park and The Lost World.
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Off the screen, the character died between the events of Jurassic Park III and Jurassic World.
Though the idea of Hammond cloning himself would be at odds with the fact that he apparently fell out with Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell) over the cloning of his own daughter, Charlotte Lockwood (Ilva Trill/Isabella Sermon) as revealed in Fallen Kingdom, the latest film, Dominion, retcons Maisie’s origins by revealing that Charlotte actually gave birth to her, which, to some extent, throws the Hammond/Lockwood drama out the window.
If Hammond does return as a clone, it would make sense for him to be played by a younger actor. However, if he returns for nothing more than a small cameo, the film would likely use Deepfake technology to re-create Richard Attenborough’s likeness, a method that has become popular in franchise such as Marvel and Star Wars, and more recently, Alien.
When Can I Watch Jurassic World Rebirth?
Jurassic World Rebirth will be released in theaters worldwide on July 2, 2025.
The film stars Scarlett Johansson (Avengers: Endgame), Jonathan Bailey (Bridgerton), Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (The Lincoln Lawyer), Rupert Friend (Obi-Wan Kenobi), Mahershala Ali (The Green Book), Luna Blaise (Manifest), David Iacono (Dead Boy Detectives), Audrina Miranda (Lopez vs Lopez), Philippine Velge (Station Eleven), Bechir Sylvain (BMF), and Ed Skrein (Deadpool).
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