Jurassic World Rebirth’s T-Rex Scene Was Worth the 35-Year Wait

It has been close to two months since Jurassic World Rebirth arrived in theaters, bringing the franchise back with its 7th installment and third reboot following the end of the Jurassic World trilogy with Dominion in 2022. While that film brought together the original film’s characters to join with Jurassic World‘s new additions, Rebirth decided to go another route to honor the original film and its source material. After tapping Godzilla and Rogue One director Gareth Edwards, original screenwriter David Koepp was brought back to the franchise he left after The Lost World: Jurassic Park in 1997.

Upon his return, Koepp also revived a scene taken directly from Michael Crichton’s original Jurassic Park novel and originally intended to appear in the first film. It even helped to inspire the fan-favorite Jurassic Park ride at Universal Studios. The ride begins as a serene trip down the river in the park with peaceful dinosaurs until things go haywire, until the point where you have a Tyrannosaurus Rex popping out of the water at you.

Koepp’s decision and the talents of the filmmakers involved resulted in a scene that was worth the 35-year wait. While this Rex is lacking any feathers and remains as it was in the original movie, digital effects have reached a point that gave fans the best T-Rex scene since the original films.

Crichton’s Book

Funny enough, the T-Rex attack on the raft from the novel is one of the few to reach the script intact as it was written. Not much else from the novels overlapped with the film that way, making it something special, and easily the biggest scene that was planned for the first movie. It reached the stage of storyboarding and even some early photography, but had to be scuttled.

In the book, Alan Grant and John Hammond’s grandkids, Tim and Lex, find an inflatable raft and use it to travel down the waterways and reach the control center of the park. While successful, the group is attacked by several dinosaurs, including the swimming T-Rex, resulting in one of the more tense scenes in the original novel.

Original Plans

When Steven Spielberg took on Jurassic Park in 1992, two years after the novel’s release, the raft scene was in the script. According to an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Koepp expanded on the scene and why the original film had to drop it from the production.

“It was 1992 and nobody knew if the CGI was going to work, much less be able to make a dinosaur swim,” Koepp told the outlet. “It was already expensive enough and with unproven technology, so it didn’t work. Water was still, in ’92, a big challenge. As you can see, it’s not anymore.”

Concept art of the scene has become popular with fans online and typically makes the rounds. It shows the Rex in the middle of the rapids and giving chase to the kids and Grant. The failure to include it in the first film played its part in helping it become a reality in Rebirth.

“When I reached the point in the draft where I was writing the raft sequence, I had the book here and I was typing here [gestures they were side by side]. That was pretty much straight out of the book,” Koepp added with Entertainment Weekly. “I found scenes, I found monologues, I found inspiration and thoughts that were a big part of this movie.”

How It Landed in Jurassic World Rebirth?

The scene that makes the jump from the page to the screen concerns the Delgado family and their unfortunate boat trip that ended with them at the mercy of the dinosaurs. Instead of deciding to use the raft and waterways to reach the Visitor Center and escape, the Delgados are just using the raft to escape away from the danger.

And while they were disoriented due to the boat rescue, and still had to fend off a Dilophosaurus, they didn’t expect a sleeping T-Rex right in front of them. It comes to life and gives us an evolved version of the Rex encounter that couldn’t have happened in the first movie. The beast makes itself known in similar fashion to the prior films, but right at a point where you might think the Delgados will escape, the Rex goes under the water. And it can swim like it was born to do it.

While a lot of the reactions to Rebirth were mixed, the T-Rex attack is worth your time. It also shows how a moment like that would be perfect to showcase the beast in the original film. Nobody would question how the Rex made it inside the Visitor Center in the original. Seeing the original screenwriter bring it back into play after years of attempts, like the Spinosaurus attack in Jurassic Park III, it is special to see it executed.

The Franchise Will Find a Way

For the Jurassic Park franchise, achieving a key scene from the original book when it is seven films in has to be special for the creatives who brought it to life. Fans are being treated to one of the top T-Rex moments in the franchise, with decades between them all. While Jurassic World Rebirth won’t go down as the greatest film in the franchise, it would be competitive when you break it down.

And despite a lukewarm critical reaction, Jurassic World Rebirth is still the fourth-highest-grossing film of 2025, grossing $833 million worldwide at publication. It is still the first Jurassic film to fall short of $1 billion at the box office, but fans who have bought their ticket have been delighted. You have to credit the strength of scenes like the T-Rex attack for that kind of reaction.

Where does the raft attack rank with your best T-Rex moments from the franchise? Does it top the original film or are we off the mark? Let us know in the comments.

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