Studios will be dusting off and sprucing up their most lucrative franchises in 2015, with a release slate that includes several new installments in well-treaded properties - Friday the 13th, Terminator and Star Wars among them - that have laid dormant since 2009 or earlier.

Jurassic Park has been gathering cobwebs for even longer than that, with the previous installment (Jurassic Park III) having opened in theaters back in 2001. Presently, there is a fourth installment scheduled for released in 2015, under the title Jurassic World and based on a screenplay written by Derek Connolly and director Colin Trevorrow (Safety Not Guaranteed), drawn from the draft penned by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes).

So, is Jurassic World a sequel, a reboot... or a partial reboot/sequel, meant to wipe the slate clean and usher in a new era for the sci-fi/horror property? Well, Trevorrow avoided giving a firm answer to that question, when one of his followers asked him if the movie is a reboot on Twitter.

Instead, he offered the following tidbit:

@pfcbains916 Reboot is a strong word. This is a new sci-fi terror adventure set 22 years after the horrific events of Jurassic Park.— Colin Trevorrow (@colintrevorrow) November 23, 2013

That Jurassic World will pick up in real time doesn't come as a huge shock, given that the idea behind the film is to acknowledge what happened in previous installments; yet, at the same time, update the franchise so it stays relevant in the current era of classic sci-fi re-imaginings and superhero blockbusters. Hence, cast members like Sam Neill won't return in the fourth JP movie, with fresher-faces like Bryce Dallas Howard (Terminator Salvation) and potentially Chris Pratt (Guardians of the Galaxy), stepping in to carry the torch forward hereon out.

Jurassic Park 4 Returning to Original Island

leaked plot breakdown revealed that an older Jurassic Park 4 script draft also picked up in real-time after Steven Spielberg's original film (released in 1993). In that version, the island of Isla Nublar now housed a fully-functional "biological preserve" for dinosaurs, as John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) intended so many years before.

Trevorrow and Connelly are reported to have since made significant revisions to that version of the script, though it appears that not all of the key elements in that draft have been removed. Additionally, Trevorrow previously indicated that the fourth Jurassic Park movie is still going to take place on Isla Nublar (not Isla Sorna, a.k.a. Site B, featured in the other sequels), while the Jurassic World title could be an allusion to the existence of a SeaWorld-esque park for dinos in the film, a la the setting in the aforementioned JP4 script draft.

To sum it all up: it's possible that Trevorrow and Connelly have altered a number of the specific details, but the premise for their Jurassic World screenplay may not be quite so different from that in the leaked JP4 synopsis. Of course, the execution of the setup in the key and this writer/director pair demonstrated with Safety Not Guaranteed that they can get a fair amount of mileage out of a basic, yet intriguing concept.

Are you excited to see a new Jurassic Park movie? Does the rumored plot sound like a good idea, or are you keeping your fingers crossed that the project will end up going with a different approach?

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Jurassic World will open in 2D and 3D theaters on June 12th, 2015.

Source: Colin Trevorrow