Credit: Inside the MagicThe Jurassic franchise has always straddled the line between science fiction and spectacle, but the upcoming film Jurassic World Rebirth (2025) is leaping headfirst into full-blown sci-fi fantasy as it will introduce genetically engineered dinosaurs that really push the boundaries of logic — and that’s saying something when we’ve already seen two dino hybrids.
Director Gareth Edwards (2014’s Godzilla remake) describes the new “Distortus Rex,” as revealed in a recent exclusive with Empire Magazine, as “kind of like if the T-Rex was designed by H.R. Giger [the artist who designed the Xenomorph in Alien], and then that whole thing had sex with a Rancor [the giant beast from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi].”
Originally teased in the film’s official trailer, this grotesquely deformed, six-limbed creature is designed to evoke both terror and sympathy, with Industrial Light & Magic’s David Vickery noting that its painful deformities add a layer of pathos to its monstrous appearance.
“It’s as if another animal has been wrapped around the T-Rex,” Vickery says in the interview with Empire Magazine. “Gareth [Edwards] wanted us to feel sorry for it as well as terrified, because its deformities have caused it some pain, and there’s an encumbrance to it.”
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But there’s more. Screenwriter David Koepp, who penned the scripts for the first two films in the series, Jurassic Park (1993) and The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), introduces the “Mutadons”, which he says are “a combination of a pterosaur and a Raptor.”
“We saw in some of the previous Jurassic World movies that their experiments made dinosaurs bigger, meaner, scarier, and it occurred to me and Steven [Spielberg] that those can’t all have gone well,” Koepp says, adding, “Sometimes, life shouldn’t have found a way.”
As intrigued as some fans may be about these new Jurassic monstrosities, this major shift certainly raises questions about the future of the franchise. With mutant dinosaurs now a reality, the notion of human-dino hybrids with guns (which was part of the scrapped script for what would have been Jurassic Park 4), or even in space, doesn’t seem so far-fetched.
If the series continues down this path, future films could indeed explore more outlandish scenarios. While there’s no reason whatsoever for InGen or any other bioengineering company to enter space, we’re sure the filmmakers will somehow find a way.
Jurassic World Rebirth stars Scarlett Johansson (Avengers: Endgame), Jonathan Bailey (Wicked), and Mahershala Ali (The Green Book) as experts on a mission to collect life-changing dinosaur DNA. But their expedition leads them to a third site of InGen’s experiments, where they encounter new, horrifying mutations.
The film is set to release in theaters on July 2, 2025.
Do you think the Jurassic series is going too far? Sound off in the comments!