February 17, 2010
Jurassic Park IV is Coming… Eventually
The poster for the first Jurassic Park film. Will there be a fourth? (Image from Wikipedia)
It is hard to know what to believe about the Jurassic Park franchise anymore. About 15 months ago the rumor was that the series had been dropped, but half a year later a studio exec stated that the prospect of bringing the dinosaurs back was still on life support. According to Hollywood scuttlebutt, producers were hoping to take the series in a new direction and were not going to make a move until they had something fresh.
In fact, a few years ago the studio had something that may have departed a little too far from the previous films. A leaked script for an early version of Jurassic Park IV featured super-smart, gun-toting raptors as main characters, and it definitely would have been one of the strangest big-budget films ever made.
But as revealed by the director of Jurassic Park III, Joe Johnston, that idea was scrapped long ago. Making the rounds to promote his new film, The Wolfman, Johnston mentioned to HitFix that ideas for a fourth dino-blockbuster are starting to come together:
Is [the gun-toting dinosaurs idea] still in the offing, or have you moved on now to a new idea?
Johnston: We have. There is an idea now for number four that is different from the first three, and that is more or less the beginning of a new triology, in that it sends the whole franchise off in a new direction. It’s not about the dinosaur park anymore. It’s about all-new characters. So Steven [Spielberg is] busy right now with the stuff he’s doing and I’ve got to do “Captain America,” but hopefully afterwards, we’ll find time to develop it. And really… it’s something different that we haven’t seen before in the “Jurassic Park” world.
So, if this is accurate, Johnston might very well be back as the director for a fourth installment, which itself will be something of a reboot for the whole franchise. What could these new ideas be? We probably won’t find out for a while. The Captain America movie is not slated to come out until the summer of 2011, and who knows when Spielberg will be available again. It will probably be another few years before the dinosaurs come back.
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I’m kind of disappointed that they’ve dropped the gun-toting raptors idea. That would have definitely made the movie worse than JPIII (in which I was cheering for the female lead’s demise the whole time). Rethinking the franchise could lead to an actual good movie. And do we really need another good dinosaur movie?
I think I’d just rather see the Dinobots in the next Transformers movie…
Some “new direction” ideas…
-An astronaut encounters a problem in space, and lands on a planet of intelligent dinosaurs. In the end we find out he was on future Isla Sorna.
-We follow a day in the life of the hapless screenwriter hired to write JP4. He starts seeing dinosaurs invade his life. Is he going crazy, or is something else going on? Written by Charlie Kaufman.
-It turns out everyone was dinosaurs the WHOLE TIME!
I’m not a huge fan of shameless self promotion, but I thought it topical to mention I had written a “Jurassic REBOOT!” post on my blog a few weeks ago. I loved the original “Jurassic Park”, and while “The Lost World” and “Jurassic Park III” were a little lacking, the idea of bringing on some really good technical advisors, and starting from scratch with a brand new story sounds wonderful to me. I think the need for another good dinosaur movie is always present, and I’d love to see some more true-to-life animals (or hypothetical ones like the “dino-chicken”) on the big screen!
Gun toting raptors? Ugh…Michael Crighton would be spinning in his grave.
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How’s this for a “new direction”? Raptors, being the smartest of the dinosaurs (so far that I know), construct an underground metropolis containing thousands or millions of dinosaurs that co-exist with humans. It has everything…banks, schools, hospitals, playgrounds, churches, ball parks, restaurants, grocery stores and other stores, fields, cinemas…even train stations with actual real trains that take passengers from one section of the metropolis to the other. How’s that for a set-up? Now, if I could just work on a plot…hmmmm…
OMG, if Michael Crighton were alive today, you know what he’d be doing?
…Stratching the hell out of the inside of his coffin, soon to die again of suffocation!
Seriously, Johnston and Spielberg, take note of this: LET THE SERIES DIE IN PEACE…
…if the same characters are not brought back you will lose your die-hard audience and after waiting this long to make another film THAT’S THE ONLY AUDIENCE YOU HAVE LEFT: DIE-HARDS AND THEIR FRIENDS!
I don’t know if you are still friends with Lucas, but don’t screw over fans for some extra cash the way he did with the animated series, respect is far more important than wealth.