Credit: Universal PicturesIf the Jurassic Park franchise were to be known for only two things, it would be the dinosaurs and its lineup of iconic characters. But recent films have seen these two ensembles overlap somewhat, with the anthropomorphizing of some of the films’ prehistoric inhabitants, namely the series’ recurring Tyrannosaurus Rex and the Velociraptors.
Of course, characters such as Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) will forever be considered the figureheads of the Jurassic Park franchise, but the Jurassic World films also helped to elevate non-human stars like that original 1993 T-Rex.
“Rexy,” as she’s affectionately known by fans, first stomped onto our screens in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster, Jurassic Park. Taking a step back from The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) and Jurassic Park III (2001) to let other T-Rexes take the spotlight, Rexy eventually made a triumphant return in the 2015 blockbuster, Jurassic World.
Directed by Colin Trevorrow, the film, which grossed $1.671 billion worldwide, repositioned Rexy as an anti-hero as opposed to the killer beast from the 1993 film, pitting her in a climactic battle against the Indominus Rex. She returned in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) and Jurassic World Dominion (2022), saving the day again in both sequels.
However, unfortunately, Rexy won’t be back in the upcoming sequel, Jurassic World Rebirth (2025). Directed by Gareth Edwards (2014’s Godzilla), the seventh film in the series stars Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow) as covert ops expert Zora Bennett, who leads a top-secret mission to an abandoned InGen island where they come face to face with mutant dinosaurs.
Set five years after the events of Dominion, which saw dinosaurs thrive in various locations around the world, Jurassic World Rebirth finds that the planet’s ecology has since “proven largely inhospitable to dinosaurs,” adding that “those remaining exist in isolated equatorial environments with climates resembling the one in which they once thrived.”
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Off the back of this official synopsis, many fans are theorizing that Rexy will be dead at the time the film begins. The last we saw her, she was enjoying life at Biosyn Valley at the end of Dominion. But, clearly unafraid to do some major retconning, Rebirth may reveal that the beloved character is no more, having perished as a result of the unaccommodating climate.
Rexy doesn’t even appear in the trailer. In fact, no original characters, whether dinosaur or human, are returning. Instead, Scarlett Johansson’s Zora will be leading the charge alongside Mahershala Ali’s Duncan Kincaid and Jonathan Bailey’s Dr. Henry Loomis, to name a few. As for the film’s dinosaurs — there are plenty of newcomers there, too.
As revealed in a recent Empire exclusive, the Kaiju-like mutant in the trailer is known as the “Distortus Rex.” There’ll also be pterosaur/raptor hybrids known as “Mutadons.” But what about the more “natural” dinosaurs? Well, there are also the likes of Quetzalcoatlus and T-Rex, but it sounds like they’re all mutations; some of them rather subtle, others not so much.
The Rex in question boasts a greenish, tiger-striped design, and will act as the main threat in the film’s river sequence, which is adapted from author Michael Crichton’s 1990 best-seller, “Jurassic Park”, having failed to make it into the original 1993 film (although it has lived on in the form of the Universal Studios’ log-flume attraction, Jurassic Park: The Ride).
In that same exclusive, director Gareth Edwards shares more about the film’s T-Rex, revealing something we don’t see in the trailer as it’s only seen either lying down or plunging its head into the river. Comparing it to the T-Rex from the fantasy Western film, The Valley of the Gwangi (1969), Edwards tells Empire that Rebirth‘s beast will look quite different.
“If you were dinosaurs making a film, you wouldn’t say, ‘Now here comes a human, and then we’ve got another human here,'” he says in the interview, explaining how no two T-Rexes in the Jurassic universe are the same. “You would say, ‘Here comes Robert De Niro, and there’s Javier Bardem.’ The original Jurassic Park T-Rex is one actor, now here’s another one.”
While the Jurassic Park Rexes have always had the same overall shape–namely its iconic, forward-arching pose–things like their patterns and colorations tend to change between films (unless it’s Rexy, of course).
But it sounds like the crew behind Jurassic World Rebirth has, in part at least, given the new T-Rex what is often referred to as the “kangaroo pose,” the more “upright” stance depicted in pre-Jurassic Park (1993) dinosaur films, which is no longer considered paleontologically accurate.
“Well, the place I tried to pull everything towards was the way people thought T-Rexes looked before we knew better,” Edwards adds. “So we looked at some of the designs in Ray Harryhausen’s films, like The Valley of the Gwangi.” He says that Rebirth‘s Rex “is kind of how, as a kid, I always thought a T-Rex would look, adding that he’s “super-happy with it.”
When Is Jurassic World Rebirth Out?
Jurassic World Rebirth releases in theaters on July 2. It 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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