Jurassic World Dominion Director Reveals How The Pandemic Changed The Movie

There will be one question that gets asked again and again about the movies released in 2021 and 2022: "How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect this movie?" As Jurassic World: Dominion now opens in theaters, it's certainly a question a lot of fans of the franchise have definitely been wondering. After all, director Colin Trevorrow was handed the premise of dinosaurs being out in the wild at the end of the previous film, Fallen Kingdom, which suggested a much larger playground for this threequel to explore. 

However, Jurassic World 3 has gotten a divisive reaction from critics, even though it's making a killing at the box office. It's been clear that one consensus of the criticism is that Dominion feels like a smaller-scale of Jurassic movie than we are used to. Stories of how Hollywood had to bend and compromise to pull off productions during the pandemic are still coming out – so how did Colin Trevorrow and the Jurassic World: Dominion team handle that challenge? 

According to Colin Trevorrow, it was impossible to ignore the world's reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic while making Jurassic World: Dominino – and impossible for the film not to be affected accordingly: 

"That was a natural result of the way we were feeling while we made the film," Trevorrow said to THR. "[Jurassic World Dominion] is a movie that is absolutely about the need to figure out a way to coexist with the natural world and each other, or else we're going to go extinct just like the dinosaurs... There are a lot of things that people say in this movie that can be applied to issues in our real world, and none of that is unintentional."

While Colin Trevorrow admits that COVID affected the kind of story they were telling in the film and caused real-world troubles (like keeping Steven Speilberg from visiting the set), he also says any messaging was balanced out properly with entertainment value: 

"I think that over time, hopefully, I've grown more adept at making these movies a Trojan horse for ideas. And I don't think they're political ideas," Trevorrow explains. "They're ideas that we all, if we don't, should agree are of real concern. But it's done without sacrificing the fact that this is a really fun ride and it's a family movie about dinosaurs. So the balance in this movie is my favorite balance of the three."

Jurassic World: Dominion is now in theaters.