We have a T. rex! Ever since the Tyrannosaurus rex roared, chomped, and stomped into the Steven Spielberg-directed Jurassic Park in 1993, the greatest predator that ever lived has been the mascot of the franchise (right down to the fossilized logo). “Rexy,” as the T. rex dino-star of Isla Nublar would come to be known, was last seen alongside Buck and Doe — the Isla Sorna T. rex mates from 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park — within a Biosyn sanctuary at the end of 2022’s Jurassic World Dominion. The trilogy ender retired the original 30-year-old T. rex alongside legacy cast members Jeff Goldblum, Laura Dern, and Sam Neill.
Videos by ComicBook.com
The fourth Jurassic World movie — appropriately titled Jurassic World Rebirth — marks a new era for the franchise. There’s a new director (Gareth Edwards, Godzilla and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story), new characters (played by Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, and Mahershala Ali), a new island (a research facility for the original Jurassic Park), and, of course, new dinosaurs.
RELATED: What to Know About Jurassic World Rebirth’s New Dinosaur, The D-Rex
Besides mutated dinosaurs like the Mutadons and the Distortus rex, genetic experiments gone awry, there are such classic species as Diloposaurus, Spinosaurus, and Pteranodon. Rebirth also features franchise newcomers like the Aquilops, the Titanosaurus, and a new breed of Tyrannosaurus rex that is already the star attraction, appearing on a promotional poster and the trailer teasing the T. rex’s attack on a river-rafting family (a sequence that originated in Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel and was cut from 1993’s Jurassic Park).
“Both Steven [Spielberg, executive producer] and I said, ‘Hey, now we can do it,’” writer David Koepp, who penned Jurassic Park and The Lost World, says of the T. rex raft scene in the Jurassic World Rebirth-covered issue of Empire Magazine. “When I was re-reading the novel, I told him, ‘Yeah, it’s as good as we remember. We have to have this.’ Because it was just a great idea for a scene, and if only one dinosaur character recurs, it has to be the T. rex.”
Just not the T. rex from Jurassic Park. Instead, Jurassic World Rebirth‘s T. rex is described as “bigger, beefier, and even surlier” — and a different breed of Tyrannosaur than what has been seen in all six installments so far.
“If you were dinosaurs making a film, you wouldn’t say, ‘Now here comes a human, and then we’ve got another human here,” Edwards explained. “You would say, ‘Here comes Robert De Niro, and there’s Javier Bardem.’ The original Jurassic Park T. rex is one actor. Now here’s another one.”
RELATED: Explainer: Why Jurassic World Rebirth Isn’t Screening in IMAX
While the bulkier rex resembles the “Bull T. rex” from Kenner’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park toyline in 1997, Edwards cited another inspiration: The Valley of Gwangi, a 1969 film which featured stop-motion dinosaur effects by Dynamation innovator Ray Harryhausen of The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts fame.
Unlike the Mark McCreery-designed Rexy, which incorporated input from paleontologists and paleoartists for the sake of accuracy, Edwards wanted the new T. rex to look “the way people thought T. rexes looked before we knew better.”
“So we looked at some of the designs in Ray Harryhausen’s films, like The Valley of Gwangi,” Edwards said, adding that there was no topping the “near perfect” Rexy from the original Jurassic Park. Rebirth‘s T. rex is “kind of how, as a kid, I always thought a T. rex would look. I’m super happy with it.”
Jurassic World Rebirth — starring Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, Mahershala Ali, Rupert Friend, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, David Iacono, Audrina Miranda, with Philippine Velge, Bechir Sylvain, and Ed Skrein — opens in theaters July 2.
Most Viewed
-
20th Television Animation
