In the wake of its enormous box office win Universal greenlit a sequel to Jurassic World due for release in 2018, with Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard confirmed to reprise their roles. Director Colin Trevorrow won’t be behind the camera, instead focusing on writing the script with Derek Connolly before handing the reins to an as-yet unconfirmed new director.
Even at this early stage in development, Trevorrow has firm ideas on where the sequel will venture. In an interview with Wired he revealed that Jurassic World 2 will explore new locations, and introduce the idea of competing dinosaur creation labs.
“[It will not be] just a bunch of dinosaurs chasing people on an island. That’ll get old real fast….I feel like the idea that this isn’t always going to be limited to theme parks, and there are applications for this science that reach far beyond entertainment.”
“And when you look back at nuclear power and how that started, the first instinct was to weaponize it and later on we found it could be used for energy. And this isn’t something necessarily that was in the book but is a seed that I wanted to plant in this movie [and] might be able to grow in more of these movies if they decide to make more of them, is: What if this went open source? It’s almost like InGen is Mac, but what if PC gets their hands on it? What if there are 15 different entities around the world who can make a dinosaur?”
“And Dr Wu says in the film, when he’s warning Dr Mesrani, ‘We’re not always going to be the only ones who can make a dinosaur’. I think that’s an interesting idea that even if we don’t explore fully in this film, there is room for this universe to expand. I shouldn’t use the word ‘universe,’ because people will think we’re making a Jurassic World universe – we’re not.”
The first Jurassic Park sequel demonstrated the havoc caused by setting a T-rex loose on the streets of San Diego. Trevorrow’s comments suggest that he and Connolly plan on attempting that same idea in a different setting. And if there’s a number of new organisations concocting their own genetically-modified dinosaurs, we could be in for a major showdown in the sequel’s finale. Jurassic World 2 opens June 22, 2018.
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