The Jurassic Park movies are still stomping around the box office, with even another on the way yet again starring Chris Pratt. This film series has spanned five movies so far, with the newer films finding immense success at the box office even though critically they have not been received as well. With a fourteen-year gap between Jurassic Park III and Jurassic World, some were left to wonder why this series had come back. It almost seems as though this franchise has betrayed the primary lesson from the films: reviving what once was can only lead to trouble.
The original Jurassic Park was spawned from the mind of Michael Crichton. The author was working on a novel about a dinosaur being cloned, and eventually, down the line, he was able to come up with the idea of a Jurassic Park. This idea was quickly caught in a bidding war with multiple studios before being finally snatched up by Universal Pictures. David Koepp helped rework the script and before too long the classic film was born.
The film was a near-instant success, becoming the highest-grossing film of 1993 and the highest-grossing of all time until 1997 saw the release of Titanic. Following the release, and incredible success, of both the film and the novel, Crichton was pressured into beginning work on a sequel that was then also adapted into a film. This film would be The Lost World, again with help from David Koepp working on the script. Yet another sequel would follow, with both sequels finding mixed reviews from critics. The franchise hype died down after this, with many deciding it’s best to forget the third film.
Years later, however, movie studios saw an opportunity. Or rather, they saw a potentially large pile of money. The franchise was revived with a star-studded cast and Hollywood’s newest leading man, Chris Pratt. This installment saw an actually functioning park fall apart after people, somehow, got bored of dinosaurs. As always, the leading downfall for those in charge is hubris and this sadly seems to also be the case for this new trilogy of films. While Jurassic World was a serviceable and overall fun entry, its sequel wasn’t nearly as well received.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom was released to mixed, but more negative-leaning reviews with many feeling that the franchise had run its course by this point. The idea of a theme park centered on genetically revived dinosaurs is a neat one, however, there is only so much story that can be told within that framework. After a certain point, things simply begin getting stranger and more tangential. This most recent entry featured a dinosaur that would follow a laser pointer.
With this fairly obvious decline in popularity, the studios seemed to have attempted to put life back into something that should have been left alone. At this point, the original film feels as though it is an entirely different world from that of the newer films. Jurassic World comes across as more of an action-thriller trilogy featuring dinosaurs, but also doesn’t quite have the maturity of the original. There are some new ideas being introduced, but they feel more suited for though experiment than an altogether coherent story for another entry.
In attempting to keep this franchise alive, the studios have slowly transformed it into a strange amalgamation that barely resembles where it began. This is a consistent theme in the movies, and it seems the studios have followed suit. This isn’t too surprising, as studios, unfortunately, tend to follow these same methods with almost any franchise. Franchises will keep finding funding as long as there is money to be made, paying no mind to what fans might think of beating a dead horse.
One slight difference from the films to the stories within is that the franchise fatigue doesn’t necessarily seem to come from the dinosaurs themselves. Often part of the praise with the newer films comes with the decent-enough CGI showing these killing machines in action. The bulk of the ire drawn from fans and critics tends to come from the writing on these newer films. The actual dinosaurs tend to be the more popular pieces, however, the central plot dinosaurs don’t seem to be nearly as well-liked.
Overall, while these movies have continued to include the same central piece, they are generally a far cry from the original. The quality had been slowly declining even heading into Jurassic Park III. With the new trilogy attempting to revive the dead franchise, it chose to shift away from the almost pure horror that was the original. Although there is no true “nature” to the industry of film, it does feel as though the studios are messing with it whenever they attempt to bring an old franchise back. The sad part is that in the end, these studios don’t really learn their lesson. They’ll always try to make the next park.