Jurassic World: Dominion director Colin Trevorrow reveals why the movie goes back to the Cretaceous Era. The Jurassic World movies owe much of their success to the popularity of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park from 1993. The 1997 sequel, The Lost World, also based on a Michael Crichton novel of the same name, was not as well-received as the original, but still considered a welcome installment to the franchise. Jurassic Park III was an outlier in the original trilogy, as it was not directed by Spielberg or based on a Crichton novel.
The first installment of the reboot trilogy, Jurassic World, was released in 2015 and returned the franchise to its former glory. Directed by Colin Trevorrow and starring Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, the film grossed $1.67 billion at the box office and set multiple major records at the time. Universal quickly ordered a sequel for 2018, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which brought Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm back to the series and grossed another $1.31 billion at the box office.
While the release of the threequel, Jurassic World: Dominion, is still a year away, it was just announced that the film’s first extended preview, a prologue sequence set during the Cretaceous period, will be shown before IMAX screenings of F9. Now, in an interview with Screen Rant, director Colin Trevorrow reveals why Dominion's prologue visits a period in history the series has never gone before:
With the Cretaceous period in the prologue sequence, why was it important to start there this time when all of the other movies kind of ignored it, except for the animation sequence in the first film? So why start with that and show that mosquito at the end?
Maybe because we hadn’t done it! That’s kind of the answer, right? It felt to me that if you’re someone who enjoys our films and you love dinosaurs enough, I can’t imagine that seeing the Cretaceous era wouldn’t interest you. And it was something I wanted in the end; I think there’s a self-indulgence in it. When I was a kid, I was a dinosaur nerd who wanted to see that world and now I’m lucky enough to be able to realize it. I went out and just grabbed the opportunity.
According to those who have already seen the preview, it takes place 65 million years ago during the Cretaceous period. Scored by Michael Giacchino, the prologue plays like a peaceful nature film, allowing viewers to experience the serenity of Earth before humans emerged. The scene will feature seven new species of dinosaurs never before seen in the previous Jurassic movies.
The scene will also include a mosquito sucking some T-Rex blood, a callback to the original Jurassic Park in which John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) clones dinosaurs by using DNA from a mosquito preserved in prehistoric amber. In a sense, Jurassic World: Dominion returns to the Cretaceous era to provide an origin story of sorts for the dinosaurs that fans have come to know and love through the films.
