Jurassic World Rebirth Will Adapt a Cut Sequence from Original Jurassic Park Novel

David Koepp is sparing no inspiration for Jurassic World Rebirth. More than 30 years after the screenwriter shared a credit on the original Jurassic Park with author Michael Crichton (adapting his 1990 novel), Koepp is penning the next installment in Universal’s reborn Jurassic World saga (named after Michael Crichton’s Jurassic World, which collected Jurassic Park and The Lost World in a single volume in 1997). Director Steven Spielberg adapted the two books into a pair of 1990s blockbusters — 1993’s Jurassic Park and 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park, both written by Koepp — but not everything from Crichton’s novels made it into the films.

While Rebirth isn’t based on any one novel, “We did take some things from them,” Koepp told Variety in an interview for his new movie Presence. “There was a sequence from the first novel that we’d always wanted in the original movie, but didn’t have room for. We were like, ‘Hey, we get to use that now.’ But just to get back in that head space 30 years later — is it still fun? And the answer is yes, it still really is. Dinosaurs are still fun.”

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Among the sequences from the novel that ultimately didn’t make it into Spielberg’s Jurassic Park are an eight-year-old girl’s near-fatal encounter with Basiliscus amoratus (later adapted for The Lost World); escaped dinosaur attacks across Costa Rica, which includes a newborn’s death by Procompsognathus; geneticist Henry Wu’s pitch to John Hammond on less-deadly cloned dinosaurs; Dr. Alan Grant’s investigation of dinosaur breeding sites; Lex and Tim’s discovery of raptors aboard the S.S. Anne B; a sequence set on Jurassic Park’s Jungle River Cruise ride; Grant, Tim, and Lex’s escape from the Tyrannosaurus rex by raft (pictured above); Hammond’s violent death from a pack of Procompsognathus; and the Costa Rican National Guard destroying Isla Nublar.

“It’s a fairly long book, and the script can only have somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the content. So what you’re really trying to do is make a sort of short story that reproduces the quality of the novel and has all the big scenes retained and has the logical flow that appears in the much longer and more extended argument,” Crichton explained in a 1993 issue of Cinefantastique. “Scenes went for all kinds of reasons: budget reasons, practical reasons, in the sense that they were difficult to do; they went out of the belief that they were repetitive in some way. But I think the primary thing that drives something like this is budget. You have to stop somewhere and where you stop, people will say, ‘Oh, that was my favorite scene, and it’s not in.’”

Crichton died in 2008, and Koepp had no involvement with the Jurassic World trilogy that brought the Jurassic Park franchise out of extinction between 2015 and 2022.

“The first two movies were two of my favorite experiences ever. And Steven [Spielberg] said, ‘What about starting over? Let’s try something all new,’” Koepp told Variety. “I said, ‘Oh, that’s a cool idea. What if blah, blah, blah,’ and then I threw an idea back. That’s it. It caught. You do that all the time with your friends and collaborators: throw ideas back and forth. And sometimes they catch, usually they don’t. There is pressure because it’s going to cost a lot of money and there are going to be big expectations and blah, blah, blah. But there was no pressure at first — just the pursuit of our ideas.”

Five years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion, where dinosaurs roamed the Earth, “The planet’s ecology has proven largely inhospitable to dinosaurs,” the Rebirth synopsis states. “Those remaining exist in isolated equatorial environments with climates resembling the one in which they once thrived. The three most colossal creatures within that tropical biosphere hold the key to a drug that will bring miraculous life-saving benefits to humankind.”

Scarlett Johansson (The Avengers) plays skilled covert operations expert Zora Bennett, contracted to lead a skilled team on a top-secret mission to secure genetic material from the world’s three most massive dinosaurs. When Zora’s operation intersects with a civilian family whose boating expedition was capsized by marauding aquatic dinos, they all find themselves stranded on an island where they come face-to-face with a sinister, shocking discovery that’s been hidden from the world for decades. Mahershala Ali (Blade) is Zora’s most trusted team leader, Duncan Kincaid; Jonathan Bailey (Wicked) is paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis; Rupert Friend (Obi-Wan Kenobi) is Martin Krebs, a rep for Big Pharma; and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (The Lincoln Lawyer) is Reuben Delgado, father of the shipwrecked civilian family.

Jurassic World Rebirth roars into theaters on July 2.