How Jurassic World Rebirth Connects to the Original Jurassic Park

A new chapter for the Jurassic World franchise begins this summer, and fans got their first taste of the action ahead of this year’s Super Bowl. With a TV spot set for the Big Game, Universal dropped the official trailer for Jurassic World Rebirth this past week. Director Gareth Edwards and screenwriter David Koepp have made no secret of the fact that this new Jurassic World movie is aiming to get back to the roots of what made Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park so great, and moving away from a lot of the tone and style of the recent Jurassic World trilogy.

Edwards has talked about how he wanted to make the film scary, like the 1993 classic, and Koepp aimed to keep the thrills mostly contained. Now that the trailer is out in the world, and some more information about the movie with it, we’ve learned that vibes aren’t the only thing connecting Jurassic World Rebirth to the original Jurassic Park. There are some direct connections on-screen in the new movie as well.

Perhaps the biggest and most obvious connection between the two films is their setting. Jurassic World Rebirth follows a team that is sent to an island on the equator to track down some dinosaurs and extract their DNA, in the hopes that they can aid in a once-in-a-generation medical breakthrough. That island, as the trailer explains, happens to be the very island where the initial Jurassic Park research labs were located.

So the team will be exploring all of the facilities where the dinosaurs were first made and tested before being let loose in Jurassic Park. So they’ll be running into some of the “failed experiments” that happened to survive (and get scarier over time).

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It’s also worth mentioning that one of the new franchise characters has some sort of connection to one of the original stars, though we don’t know what it is just yet. Jurassic World Rebirth‘s Jonathan Bailey recently told Vanity Fair that his character, Dr. Henry Loomis, has a connection to Dr. Alan Grant, the main character of Jurassic Park.

“I’ve always wanted to make Dr. Alan Grant proud,” Bailey said. “You’ll have to wait and see to see what sort of link there is between them.”

The last major connection between the films — that we know of right now — is actually a scene that was cut from the Jurassic Park script during development. There’s a scene from Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park novel that sees Grant and the two kids trying to paddle a raft past a sleeping T-Rex without waking it. Koepp wasn’t able to fit it into the first Jurassic Park movie but always wanted to find a way to bring it to the screen. So he ended up writing a new version of the scene into Jurassic World Rebirth.

Jurassic World Rebirth hits theaters on July 2nd.