Is the first Jurassic World Rebirth trailer hiding a dinosaur-sized original movie Easter Egg?
More like a six-foot turkey, you say?
You wait 65 million years for a Jurassic Park reboot to come along, and then you get two in a decade. Get a first look below at the debut trailer for Jurassic World Rebirth, the second time life has found a way to inject some fresh blood into the dinosaur-resurrecting franchise:
Universal’s tentpole blockbuster movie for the summer, it’s got an all new gang heading to a remote jungle island full of bus-sized reptiles.
This time out it’s Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey and Mahershala Ali running away from the snapping jaws of T-Rexes and raptors, with the trailer promising dinosaurs deemed “too dangerous” to exhibit at the original Jurassic Park.
Anyone who saw the last, painful Jurassic movie — 2022’s Jurassic World Dominion — might also deem it "too dangerous" to return to this well-excavated franchise so soon after the last flick’s critical panning. But there’s a strong cast here and a good team behind the camera — our very own Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, Rogue One) is in the director's seat, and knows his way around a monster-sized blockbuster, while the original Jurassic Park screenwriter, David Koepp, is back for the script, too.
And there’s already a tease that there’s potentially a killer story to tell here, the secret of which might be hiding in plain sight in this first trailer.
Who is Dr. Henry Loomis?
Jonathan Bailey plays Dr. Henry Loomis, the bespectacled scientist of the trailer, seemingly being kept alive by Ali and Johansson’s more world-weary gun-toting characters.
A scientist taking the lead in a Jurassic Park film is nothing new of course — the series is full of them, most notably Sam Neill’s Dr. Alan Grant, the franchise’s most-iconic hero.
But it’s the potential link between this new Dr. and that legacy character that is perhaps the most intriguing through-line element in this new movie.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Bailey (who you may recognise from megahit Wicked) teased that Loomis has some history with Grant.
"I’ve always wanted to make Dr. Alan Grant proud," the actor told Vanity Fair. "You’ll have to wait and see to see what sort of link there is between them."
Now, that’s not a lot to go on, but it hasn’t stopped us — along with the many other series fans across the web — from wondering… is Dr. Henry Loomis the ‘six-foot turkey’ kid from the original Jurassic Park, all grown up?
An early scene in the original movie shows a curmudgeonly Grant verbally cutting a kid down to size when the bratty child shrugs off the threat of a velociraptor in its prime as nothing more than a “six-foot turkey”. "Try to show a little respect," Grant quips in return — after thoroughly describing how a raptor disembowels its prey before eating them alive:
Did that same boy take that to heart? Did he become a dino-expert over the years too? Is he then dumb enough to go toe-to-toe with that terrifying turkey?
We’ll have to wait until July 2nd to find out, when Jurassic Park Rebirth hits cinemas.