The Original Jurassic Park 4 Script Sounds Nuts (Would It Have Been Better Than Jurassic World?)

With Jurassic World Rebirth arriving ten years after Jurassic World’s debut, audiences will officially have experienced more Jurassic installments over the last decade than they did in the first 21 years after Jurassic Park’s release. Today, it’s easy to forget, but there was a time when countless obstacles seemed to make it a foregone conclusion that Jurassic Park would remain a trilogy. The days of a raptor exclaiming “Alan!” in Jurassic Park III seemed destined to be the grand final of this saga. With problems like the passing of Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton, creative changes behind the scenes, and The Great Recession, these dinos faced no shortage of obstacles in evading cinematic extinction.

Jurassic World would eventually arrive in June 2015 and shatter box office expectations across the globe. For many, it seemed like an inevitable next step for the franchise to explore what would happen if a version of Jurassic Park actually opened. Getting to that narrative, though, was a long and winding road that included a now infamous alternate Jurassic Park 4 script that was nothing short of bonkers.

What Was The Plot of This Proposed Jurassic Park 4?

In the eons between Jurassic Park III and Jurassic World, multiple different ideas for how to extend the franchise were considered. Some explicitly continued the world of Jurassic Park III by further exploring the world of Dr. Alan Grant. However, the most famous unmade version of Jurassic Park 4 was written by director John Sayles. In his career, Sayles is most well-known for socially conscious and intimate works like Matewan and Lone Star. However, Sayles cut his teeth as a screenwriter on cheapie Roger Corman genre films like Piranha and Battle Beyond the Stars.

Sayles would evoke those roots with his absolutely unhinged concept for a fourth Jurassic Park adventure. This production would’ve focused on an almost exclusively new cast of characters grappling with a new biological threat: dinosaurs spliced with human DNA’s. These creatures were supposed to be the ideal soldiers, since they could handle weapons like human beings but had all the ferocity of a dinosaur. Leaked concept art for the film shows that this idea would not have been grounded in reality visually. Jurassic Park 4 was committed to humanoid creatures that had T-Rex teeth, scales, and other dinosaur flourishes.

The feature envisioned by Sales would’ve apparently concluded with those dinosaur soldiers (while trying to rescue a girl taken hostage by evildoers) gaining autonomy and betraying the normal human characters. Life finds a way and wouldn’t you know it, dinosaurs chowing down on humans overly confident in their ability to control nature also finds a way. This vision of Jurassic Park 4 would’ve been a massive departure from everything that preceded this feature in the Jurassic Park franchise. Perhaps it was too audacious, as this version of the production would eventually fall apart. It would take until the early 2010s for Jurassic Park 4 to gain any more momentum.

[RELATED: Jurassic World Rebirth Confirms a Fan-Favorite Dinosaur’s Return After 20 Years]

Would This Project Have Improved on Jurassic World?

Decades after Sayles wrote this bananas screenplay, it’s worth asking whether or not his version of Jurassic Park 4 sounds superior to the Jurassic World audiences got in June 2015. That’s a difficult comparison given that one of these projects exists only as a screenplay and the other is a finished film. Who knows if this earlier iteration of Jurassic Park 4 would’ve maintained all its endearing madness to its final cut. However, on a conceptual level, this does sound like a much more entertaining and fearless ride than the more nostalgic-centric Jurassic World.

While Colin Trevorrow’s 2015 follow-up was very focused on reminding people of the past, the vision of Jurassic Park 4 from Sayles and company sounds like a total upending of expectations of what a Jurassic Park movie even looks like. It could’ve delivered beasts, visuals, and types of action sequences we still haven’t seen in this franchise. Plus, this iteration of Jurassic Park 4 would’ve fully committed to audacious ideas like dinosaur/human hybrid soldiers.

That’s a welcome stark contrast to how the Jurassic World movies keep waking back potentially game-changing notions for the saga like Fallen Kingdom’s fizzled-out cliffhanger of dinosaurs getting out into the human world. Though it certainly would’ve been divisive, this version of Jurassic Park 4 sounds like something that would’ve inspired livelier discussions and responses than the Jurassic World just serving up what audiences knew they wanted. That very quality, alas, is likely why Universal and Amblin opted to pass on this concept for a sequel. Who knows, though. Given how frequently Jurassic World sequels are being made nowadays, perhaps some of the concepts in that Jurassic Park 4 script will manifest in future installments of the saga.

Jurassic World Rebirth arrives in theaters on July 2.