Hype finds a way? Not for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which is being lumbered with a series of incredibly boring trailers. Why are Universal struggling so much to market their latest dinosaur action flick?Jurassic World 2 is a little over two months away, so the release of its third and final trailer should be the moment where hype tips into overdrive. Instead, this latest tease has been met yet again with a resounding shrug. The first teaser back in December courted fairly high levels of anticipation, yet the moment it hit the excitement fell apart like a lackluster flea circus. The Super Bowl trailer improved things slightly, only to be trodden under the stampede of bigger competition like Avengers: Infinity War, Solo: A Star Wars Story, and, of course, The Cloverfield Paradox.

Now Jurassic World 2 is three-for-three on bland trailers; the "Final Trailer" has arrived and, while it definitely gives a better sense of what the movie's about, there's still a lingering sense of exhausted disappointment. Why is this proving so difficult?

  • This Page: Jurassic World 2 Is A Hard Sell

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom Is An Awful Movie To Sell

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is already a weird beast before you get to the first frame of footage. It's billed as Jurassic World 2, ergo a sequel to 2015's box office behemoth. However, it is also technically Jurassic Park 5, continuing the narrative begun in Steven Spielberg's 1993 classic; in fact, with the return of Ian Malcolm and increased dominance of original evil company InGen (and a lot of nostalgia-baiting shots), this feels storywise closer to the original trilogy moreso than its direct predecessor. So it's at once a follow-up to a recent hit - albeit one that's not aged well in popular memory - and a legacy-quel continuation; a balancing act that Star Wars: The Last Jedi, whose trailers got a muted reaction compared to the bombast of The Force Awakens, also struggled with.

Things are made more complicated by the movie itself. Namely, Jurassic World 2 is two films in one: you have Chris Pratt's Owen brought back to Isla Nublar by Bryce Dallas Howard's Claire to save the dinosaurs from (presumably) a volcanic eruption; and yet there's a genre pivot halfway through, with a conspiracy revealed, a returning focus on Jurassic World's genetic modification, and overall horror sensibility. To sell all that, and do so in a coherent way, is tricky; simply presenting a string of random shots from across the film - which this latest trailer does - creates a mishmash of tones and styles (the added humor of a Pratt thumbs up only muddies matters further). Not ideal, especially when it goes against what came before.

Jurassic World 2's Trailers Went From Spoilerphobic To Spoiler-Ful Without Warning

It's likely Fallen Kingdom is written - like original sequel The Lost World - to be viewed as a simple rescue mission that is only gradually revealed to be a corporate cover; the shot of Claire screaming "it was all a lie" seems to come following the semi-successful rescue, meaning at the very least the characters are in the dark about whatever InGen's up to until after the volcano.

With such a twist coming midway through, the first teaser naturally held back, only featuring footage from the first 100 minutes; it was focused almost entirely on the volcano set piece. That created problems for that trailer - it was trying to present an early sequence as something more final and epic (we'll come back to that) - but issues have grown now the marketing is revealing everything; the plot dump in the latest trailer goes against that initial cautiousness, which is brash and frankly confusing.

What is Jurassic World 2? Is it a comedy, a horror, a Lost World remake, a Jurassic World second part, or a Jurassic Park sequel? It's all of them, but the trailers - and the posters, with their interchangeably overly-nostalgic or dumb taglines - have had no way to sell that and so just threw a mixture of ideas out there. The result has had no clear narrative for fans of Jurassic to follow, with those paying attention led one way and then snapped back in another two months before the movie's even out.

Jurassic World 2's Trailer Are Badly Edited

The first real indication something was wrong with Jurassic World's trailer editing came partway through the first teaser. Chris Pratt is about to be attacked by a fleeing dinosaur before the T-Rex (yes, the same T-Rex from the original) swoops in and pins the attacker down, rearing up and letting out a gigantic roar as Nublar's volcano erupts. That should be the most awe-inspiring shot of the entire movie - T-Rex plus volcano with added Pratt is one hell of a sell - and yet it falls entirely flat. Not only is the framing and composition obscuring much of the wider spectacle - worrying as that's straight from the movie - but it comes not as the money shot of the trailer rather in the middle of a bigger sequence; before the T-Rex has finished her roar, we're straight into an ash cloud escape that ends with the far less exciting "dinosaurs in water" moment. The trailer provides no time for its "cool" shot to sit, instead of dragging audiences along.

Of course, trailers are primarily eye-candy, designed to grab you while waiting for another movie to start, so putting as much as possible up there to create a sense of value is understandable. But with Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, everything is edited so relentlessly it lacks anything tangible to latch onto; what are surely more impressive sequences in the film look washed-out and bland (see the Mosasaurus at the beach). Good trailers tell a story, these do not.

This misconstruing of what the sell is runs rampant throughout the subsequent trailers too. The latest one ends with the Indoraptor breaking into a little girl's room by opening the window and sneaking up to her bed, cutting to black just as it lunges for her. Now, it looks a cool sequence (bar the rather base-level nod to raptors opening doors in the original Jurassic Park), yet is butchered here by the fact we know how it ends; we saw the resolution of the scene - Owen and Blue burst in to fight the hybrid dinosaur - just forty seconds earlier (as well as in chronological order in the Super Bowl spot). Add to that two uses of the "dinosaur's eye as it wakes up" shocker setpiece, and the trailers begin to feel like a ripoff of themselves. Repeating footage in different setups across a marketing campaign is to be expected, but it's being stretched with Jurassic World 2.

Do Jurassic World 2's Bad Trailers Matter?

The only thing more disheartening than Jurassic Park winding up a rather generically-marketed franchise (the first teaser for the original, slowly building the pseudo-science behind the franchise, is a thing of beauty), is that this turn for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom probably won't matter in the long-run.

Jurassic World was a projection-smashing success, bringing in $1.67 billion worldwide (more than that summer's Avengers movie by almost $300 million) and is still the fifth highest-grossing movie at the domestic box office of all-time. Even with a 50% drop for its sequel, it would probably place as one of the ten biggest movies of the year. There's no such thing as a movie "too big to fail", but if there's going to be an exception to prove the rule, it's Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

That's doubly true as, for all their blandness, the trailers have succeeded in selling one thing: Fallen Kingdom is different. Jurassic World has suffered a fair backlash in the three years since its release, with the repetitive storytelling, uninspired direction, and unabashed product placement seeing it lambasted as a betrayal of Speilberg's original thesis. J.A. Boyana's sequel looks decidedly different, with a real horror edge - especially in those gradually uncovered second-half sections - that does go a long way to at the very least reinstilling fan faith in the franchise (even if the trailers don't offer much of it tangibly).

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It'll be a hit, and it'll probably be liked. So the real question is, why haven't Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom's trailers tried harder?

Next: Jurassic World 2 Has To Solve The Franchise's Female Character Problem

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