May 2, 2012
Dinosaur Cinema Explosion
A promotional image, featuring a baby Pachyrhinosaurus, for Walking With Dinosaurs 3-D.
Are we about to experience another burst of Dinomania? Maybe. Dinosaurs already have a ubiquitous cultural presence, but nothing drives interest in the beloved prehistoric creatures like Hollywood films. A stampede of dinosaur flicks is set to debut over the next two years.
A few dinosaur features fall somewhere on the educational spectrum. The Werner Herzog-narrated Dinotasia—a re-blended version of the miniseries Dinosaur Revolution—is set to traumatize children who have no idea who Werner Herzog is. And the long-running Walking With Dinosaurs series is scheduled to launch a 3-D sequel sometime next year. The plot for the new installment, set in Cretaceous Alaska, sounds awfully similar to the televised special March of the Dinosaurs.
Not all the upcoming dinosaur dramas are documentaries, though. Pixar recently announced the title of its 2014 feature The Good Dinosaur. The plot plays a little loose with evolutionary theory to bring people and dinosaurs in contact with each other. But the rest of the cinematic dinosaurs are not going to be so friendly. Jurassic Park will get a 3-D conversion for the movie’s 20th (!) anniversary in 2013, and not wanting to be left out, Warner Brothers is apparently working to loose “a pack of rapidly evolving dinosaurs into the heart of contemporary Los Angeles.” The idea sounds a bit like 2001′s Evolution, which released extremely adaptable aliens into Arizona. Maybe the studio competition will turn the rumors of Jurassic Park 4 into something more tangible, but who knows? Dinosaurs vs. Aliens, one of the latest ideas to exploit the seemingly bottomless limits of the versus subgenre, may hit screens before the Jurassic Park franchise evolves.
From the looks of it, there will be a little something for everyone, from friendly manifestations of childhood dreams to rampaging, bloodthirsty tyrannosaurs. I’m hoping for beautifully rendered feathers, recently discovered dinosaurs we’ve never seen restored before, and a respect for dinosaurs that doesn’t treat them as mindless monsters or just kid’s stuff, but I guess we will have to wait and see. Non-avian dinosaurs vanished around 66 million years ago, but we love to bring them back to life on screen.
Sign up for our free email newsletter and receive the best stories from Smithsonian.com each week.
5 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Out of all of these, the only ones I really have hope for are the Walking with Dinosaurs sequel, and The Good Dinosaur. And with the latter, as silly as I’m sure the evolutionary theory bits will be, I will be completely willing to suspend belief if they, at the very least, have feathered Maniraptorans, and pycnofibers on their Pterosaurs (I have a feeling we’ll see at least one feathered theropod, but I will be quite disappointed, yet not surprised, if there are no fuzzy pterosaurs).
The general public is going to pack the house when JP3D comes out because no matter how much money you have invested in a home theater system, nothing can replace the HUGE screen and deafening sound of a roaring Rex at the ol’ Bijou.
If Universal was smart, they’d re-release it every 7-10 years to a ‘new’ audience, ala Disney and their classics.
And Evan’s comments above reminded me, I think I had one too many fuzzy pterosaurs at the bar the other night. ha
Cheers!
If nothing else, I hope this spate of movies inspires some other dinosaur media. We haven’t had an anthology of dinosaur fiction for quite a while, for instance.
And if Jurassic Park the film is getting an anniversary edition, what about the novel? I’ve always wanted to see an annotated version of the novel with accompanying illustrations and essays. Imagine that as an interactive ebook* for tablets… but now I’m just dreaming.
*Jurassic Park isn’t currently available as an ebook, although its inferior sequel, The Lost World, is. This is ironic give JP was released as an ebook back in 1992: http://alfabravo.com/2011/08/early-ebooks-and-why-they-failed/
An older theater up here screened Jurassic Park a few years ago. It was wonderful. I hadn’t seen that movie on the big screen since I was 10! The Walking with Dinosaurs sequel is pretty exciting considering it’s dealing with Alaska’s dinosaur fauna (my backyard). It’ll be interesting to see if they put feathers on Troodon and Stenonychosaurus, and if Albertosaurus has some now that we’ve got Yutyrannus.
Of course, the BIGGEST draw will be the pachyrhinosaurs. The animal in the screenshot, with the bulbs on either side of the rostral comb, looks a bit like P. canadensis, but I’m hoping to see the parietal hooks of P. perotorum.
@Zach Miller
“It’ll be interesting to see if they put feathers on Troodon and Stenonychosaurus,”
I would think so, given the pic in this link: http://www.markwitton.com/#/consultancy/4552742056