Credit: Universal PicturesJurassic World Rebirth (2025) might have been a huge win for Universal and the long-running franchise commercially after grossing $869.1 million worldwide, but it was a critical failure.
Jurassic World Rebirth Has Ruined the Franchise
The seventh entry in the series received mixed to negative reviews from audiences and critics. But longtime fans were even less forgiving, with many being hugely critical of the film’s creative choices and overall execution.
Getting the least egregious problems out of the way, Rebirth suffers from a painfully derivative, paint-by-numbers script from David Koepp, who worked on the screenplays for Jurassic Park (1993) and The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997).
The film is also populated with criminally underdeveloped lead characters, including Scarlett Johansson’s covert operations expert Zora Bennett, Mahershala Ali’s ops team leader Duncan Kincaid, and Jonathan Bailey’s paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis.
The Global Dinosaur Premise Had So Much Potential
Its worst crime, however, is that it undoes the popular global dinosaur premise set up by its two predecessors, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) and Jurassic World Dominion (2022).
For all their many flaws, Fallen Kingdom and Dominion went to great lengths to move away from the long-exhausted jungle island formula. The 2018 sequel unleashed dinosaurs into the North American wilderness and beyond, while Dominion established a fully-functioning global ecosystem in which the dinosaurs were flourishing. In other words, life found a way.
In Rebirth, it turns out that life didn’t find a way. Following an opening sequence where scientists on a third InGen island named Ile Saint-Hubert inexplicably cause a system-wide containment failure with a Snickers wrapper, we’re treated to some lazy, on-screen text.
The blurb tells us that dinosaurs are now dying all around the world because the planet’s ecology is no longer hospitable to them, adding that many have migrated to the equator, where the climate resembles the one in which they thrived tens of millions of years ago.
In other words, another island.
Related:Â ‘Jurassic Park’ Officially Hitting Reset After ‘Rebirth’ Ruins Film Series
Where Can the Jurassic Park Films Go From Here?
Unsurprisingly, this retcon didn’t land well with fans hoping to see dinosaurs wreaking havoc all around the world, or at the least, an original story set somewhere that wasn’t an island. Instead, Rebirth opts for the tried-and-tested formula of jungles and facility settings.
Now, the series has been written into a creative corner. Rebirth has squandered the vast storytelling potential of dinosaurs existing all around the world. While many fans would gladly accept, without question, the next sequel somehow admitting fault and reinstating those global dinosaur populations, there’s no denying that Jurassic has nowhere to go from here — unless, of course, Universal Pictures decides to do the unlikely thing and hit reset.
Jurassic Park Needs to Follow the Halloween Formula
We aren’t talking about a full reboot of the Jurassic Park franchise, but rather an approach that mirrors the likes of Halloween, which found success with its latest trilogy. Directed by David Gordon Green, Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills (2021), and Halloween Ends (2022) involved erasing every sequel that followed John Carpenter’s original 1978 classic.
This franchise-wide retcon allowed the new trilogy of films to tell a much cleaner story unburdened by all the other films and their hugely conflicting ideas on lore. Although this wasn’t a first for the Halloween series — two decades before, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) wiped away the convoluted and nonsensical Thorn trilogy.
Jurassic is nowhere near as messy as the Halloween franchise, which has had sequels, spinoffs, remakes, and retcons. But if it continues on this trajectory, the studio may be forced to hit reset. Let’s suppose Universal does wipe out a bunch of sequels, though — it wouldn’t necessarily need to erase them from existence, but it could instead give us a prequel set during the Park era, which wouldn’t even need to acknowledge the Jurassic World era at all.
Fortunately, we are getting a prequel in another medium, with the upcoming first-person action-adventure video game Jurassic Park: Survival (TBA) from Saber Interactive, which takes place on Isla Nublar just 24 hours after the events of the 1993 film.
As for the film series, we’ll just have to wait and see. While a new film is rumored to be in development at Universal, the studio hasn’t made any announcements.
For now, we can’t help but wonder what it will be about. After Rebirth‘s bizarre mutant dinosaur premise, something along the lines of human dino-hybrids and end-of-the-world scenarios seems inevitable. So, please can we hit reset?
Would you like to see Jurassic Park follow in the footsteps of Halloween and wipe out a bunch of sequels? Or would you be happy with Jurassic World Rebirth being the only one that’s erased? Let us know in the comments below!
