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Credit: Universal PicturesJurassic World Rebirth (2025) might have grossed over $860 million worldwide, but the film has faced plenty of criticism from longtime fans for showing next to no appreciation for everything that came before it. And now, it has done the franchise another major disservice.
On the surface, the seventh film in the long-running series, directed by Gareth Edwards (Rogue One) and written by David Koepp (who co-wrote the first two films), expands upon the Jurassic Park lore, introducing a previously unmentioned island named Ile Saint-Hubert that’s teeming with mutant dinosaurs. But in doing so, it completely messes up the timeline.
Jurassic World Rebirth Doesn’t Respect Canon and Lore
Not only does the film do a terrible job at explaining what this island was used for — in one scene, Scarlett Johansson’s covert ops expert Zora Bennett suggests it was a facility for the original Jurassic Park, yet in another, Rupert Friend’s big pharma rep Martin Krebs implies it was used to create hybrid dinosaurs for Jurassic World — but the existence of the island itself is completely at odds with a lot of extended tie-in material (which we’ll get to later).
The film also undoes the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) and Jurassic World Dominion (2022) by wiping out dinosaurs all around the world, rendering them on the verge of extinction once again, despite the fact they were previously shown to be thriving everywhere. But why? According to the official synopsis, the planet’s ecology is no longer hospitable to the prehistoric creatures.
Those that survive live near or along the equator, where the climate is said to resemble the one in which they lived many millions of years ago.
And it’s all because screenwriter David Koepp didn’t want to deal with such a sandbox-scale premise, as he even told The Hollywood Reporter he didn’t want to write about humans and dinosaurs “fighting over a cab” (in hindsight, we’re lucky he didn’t try to follow it up then).
Universal Has Erased a Beloved Jurassic Entry
If you thought the new film couldn’t do any more damage, Universal has now quietly removed a long-standing component of the Jurassic World franchise: DinoTracker.com.
Built to accompany the global dinosaur premise established in Fallen Kingdom and explored in Dominion, the official website offered fans “real-time” updates on dinosaur populations and their geo-locations. The website came online on May 10, 2022, shortly before the release of Dominion, and was run “in-universe” by the Department of Prehistoric Wildlife.
In November, however, a few months after the release of Rebirth, which confined the story to yet another isolated environment, Universal retired the Dino Tracker website, seemingly erasing it from canon. Now, attempts to access the site redirect users to JurassicWorld.com.
Related: New ‘Jurassic Park’ Sequel Answers Franchise’s Biggest Mystery After 32 Years
The Website Was a Crucial Part of Jurassic World-Building
Dino Tracker had become a beloved hub for fans, providing a unique interactive way to follow the sprawling universe of Jurassic World beyond the films. Its influence extended across multiple media platforms: the animated series Chaos Theory (which recently concluded), the two most recent Jurassic World Evolution video games, and tie-in novels like the Maisie Lockwood Adventures, all incorporating the idea of a planet-wide dinosaur monitoring network.
It also helped to enrich the films themselves. But now, it’s gone.
While the films’ narrative has now restricted dinosaur activity to an island setting again, the Dino Tracker represented a time when the franchise envisioned a more expansive ecosystem. Fans could check the tracker to see where individual species were “located” and what interactions were occurring, blending storytelling with real-time engagement in a way few movie franchises attempted.
This wasn’t the first website built for the films — that honor goes to Masrani Global, which was set up to promote and enhance Jurassic World in 2015.
That website has since been expired, too, but thankfully, you can still access the third “in-universe” website known as Dinosaur Protection Group.
Is Jurassic World Rebirth Really Canon?
On one hand, Rebirth has caused a great deal of damage to the Jurassic series. Commercially, it was a huge success; creatively, it’s completely bankrupt.
All of that incredibly rich world building in Fallen Kingdom and Dominion that extended through all the tie-in media has now swiftly been undone just so the franchise could swing back to yet another island, a setting the 2018 sequel, for all its flaws, went to great lengths to cut ties with by literally blowing up Isla Nublar and bringing dinosaurs to the mainland.
On the other hand, one could view the retiring of DinoTracker.com as a canonical event. Earlier this year, before Rebirth hit theaters, the website was updated to continuously display error logs for all the global dinosaur sightings, which is in line with the fact that dinosaurs have been dying off left and right in the film.
With that said, Ile Saint-Hubert, which is revealed in the film to be located in Suriname, didn’t even appear on Dino Tracker.
How’s that for canon?
Related: ‘Jurassic World Rebirth 2’: Plot, Cast, Release Date, and Human-Dino Hybrids
Many are now choosing to view Rebirth as alternate canon. And there’s a case to be made here. If the filmmakers have made next to no effort to respect the established lore, then has the story even earned a place in canon? Well, no. The film clashes with canon left and right, making it difficult for many to accept even if they wanted to.
Ultimately, whether a film is canon or not is up to the fans. One can easily pretend that Rebirth doesn’t exist. The sad part is that its existence means the extinction of a beloved entry.
While the franchise continues with new films, merchandise, and theme park attractions, the absence of Dino Tracker marks the end of a chapter in Jurassic World’s digital experimentation.
Its influence remains visible in the lore of Chaos Theory and the Evolution games, but for fans who grew attached to tracking dinosaurs in real-time across a global map, the removal signals a permanent shift in how the franchise is presented going forward.
Jurassic World Rebirth 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).
How do you feel about Jurassic World Rebirth? Yay or nay? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!