2016 will see over a half dozen movies united in celebration of tightly wrapped man muscles and circus-flavored bad guys. Another half dozen blockbusters star talking animals (or food). Sometimes the animals sing. We’ve got more horror movies starring creepy dolls and creepy kids, new remakes and fresh sequels. Every iteration of the post-apocalypse has been investigated at length, mainly by young adults pretending to be teenagers. When Hollywood comes across a concept, genre, aesthetic or Dwayne Johnson that can capture both midwest mall eyeballs (mallballs) and Chinese yuan, they’ve never been shy about photocopying, pillaging, rebooting and otherwise poaching the ideas that work until they’re so worn down they don’t.
So why all the deference to the Jurassic Park series? People love dinosaurs. But outside of Jurassic Park movies, the entire clade barely exist in mainstream blockbusters. Setting aside animated movies and the Jurassic Park series I count eight studio releases featuring dinosaurs since the 1993 release of Jurassic Park. And even getting to that number requires counting dinosaur skeletons (Night at the Museums), Dinobots (Transformers) and their brief, oddball presence in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life .
Despite Jurassic World making enough money to buy some island nations ($1,670,400,637 worldwide) we’re not seeing dinosaurs anywhere else (except animated movies). Producers must be too busy figuring out new ways to blow up the White House or spending all the development cash on clunky, metallic armor that still makes breasts look good.
This is baffling to me. One movie retrofitting fantasy tropes with Johnny Depp in greasepaint and we’re stuck with Alice Through the Looking Glass, The Huntsman, Oz the Great and Powerful and action-fantasy vomit of every conceivable stripe, for every demographic from teenage girls to teenage boys to teenage adults. But over two decades after Jurassic Park made a billion dollars, the entire dinosaur stage has been surrendered to its sporadic sequels, all of which have also made dinosaurian buttloads of cash (even Jurassic Park III, which leaned on the radiant star power of William H. Macy and Téa Leoni).
What’s going on here? Why isn’t Jennifer Lawrence riding a utahraptor into battle against Channing Tatum’s dino knights? Has no one in Hollywood figured out you could just find and replace “monkey” for “T. Rex” in the Dawn of the Planet of the Apes script?
It’s not that Hollywood should be less creative and more derivative. But dinosaurs have been ill-served by Jurassic World and its ilk. The entire Jurassic Park series is like a funhouse mirror version of the Jaws franchise, where the sequels just keep getting worse and worse, but the money grows.
So let’s not put so many eggs in the Jurassic World basket. If Jurassic World 2 sucks, we’ll need at least a half dozen other dinosaur vs. superhero vs. Death Star movies to fill the Mesozoic-shaped hole in our hearts.
