Colin Trevorrow hasn’t been resting on his laurels since the monster success of Jurassic World. The screenwriter shared some meaty details with fandom podcast JurassicCast recently about the direction the rest of the trilogy is headed.
Hint: It’s toward the theme park’s exit sign.
Trevorrow revealed for the first time that he’s been developing separate, central themes for each of the three movies—or at least the two under his purview before he goes on to direct the ninth Star Wars film.
The theme of Jurassic World, at least the one in his head, is all based on a single quote from Jeff Goldblum’s character Ian Malcolm in the very first film:
“You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you want to sell it.”
This theme, according to Trevorrow, was why Jurassic World emphasized so much product placement and commercialism. Rather than build on that for future films, Trevorrow opted for a different theme for the second film:
“Dinosaurs and man, separated by 65 million years of evolution, have been thrown back into the mix together. What to expect?”
That means we can expect future films to spend a lot less time showing “people running around on islands being chased by dinosaurs,” as Trevorrow put it, and more time expanding the world of the theme park universe outward.
Dinosaurs and kaiju escaping their confines and interacting with humans, both violently and peacefully, has been a core staple of the creature film genre for decades, so it’s not clear what exactly Trevorrow hopes to bring to the experience that will be new and fresh.
For future films, Trevorrow also claimed that Chris Pratt‘s Owen and Bryce Dallas Howard‘s Claire, the two main characters from Jurassic World, would be back—but drastically altered after their experiences in the first film:
…Neither are going to be in the same place we left them in the first movie. And even though Claire is the one who evolves the most over the trilogy, it’s her story that mirrors this changing world. Owen has shit to deal with. They’ve both opened Pandora’s Box in Jurassic World and both of them are responsible for different elements of it.
You can listen to the full interview here.
Screengrab via SchmoePlus/YouTube