'Jurassic World Rebirth' will lean more into fear

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In the latest film in the colossal blockbuster franchise, Jurassic World Rebirth, inhabitants of that world are not unlike moviegoers today: People have seen dinosaurs a lot over the years. They’ve seen them revived from extinction, they’ve seen them get loose and run amok, they’ve seen them so often that awe has been replaced by a shrug. Dinosaurs no longer inspire love.

So producer Frank Marshall and Steven Spielberg, who astonished audiences with the groundbreaking visual effects of the 1993 original, felt that Rebirth should lean into causing fear. After completing two trilogies of films, which collectively generated billions of dollars at the global box office, they believed a seventh film would have to escalate the risk to new levels. “I’ve always said that visual effects are great, CGI is a great tool, but it makes you lazy because you know you can do anything,” Marshall tells Vanity Fair for this exclusive early look. “It’s got to be dangerous.”

That became the mission of Rebirth: “You're in a new place, you don’t know what’s around the corner. You’ve got a different jungle, you’ve got more water, you’ve got higher cliffs,” Marshall says. “There’s a little bit of everything that’s scary.” Add to that a new array of creatures literally engineered to trigger fight or flight.

The story follows members of a recovery team—led by Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, and Jonathan Bailey—as they venture to an island near the equator that was once home to the first Jurassic Park’s research lab. The squad is trying to retrieve genetic material that could lead to a medical breakthrough for humanity, but three decades later the mistakes made at that ruined facility have not gone away. They’ve endured—and only grown bigger. “These are the dinosaurs that didn’t work. There’s some mutations in there,” Marshall says. “They’re all based on real dinosaur research, but they look a little different.”

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Complacency was the biggest risk for early humans. Marshall credits Koepp, who returns to the Jurassic film franchise for the first time since the 1997 sequel The Lost World, for introducing the notion to Rebirth. “He came up with this idea that dinosaurs were passé now. People were tired of them. They were an inconvenience,” Marshall says. “People weren’t going to museums to see them or to petting zoos. They were just in the way. And the climate was not conducive to their survival, so they were starting to pass away and get sick. But there was one area around the equator that had the perfect climate and temperature and environment for them.”

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