Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous Twist Ending Confirmed to Be 100% Canonical

This past week, Netflix launched an animated series called Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, a kid-centric spinoff of the popular Jurassic Park franchise. Most viewers have been surprised by just how intense the series gets at times, especially towards the end of the first season, as it feels a lot more like the movies than expected. As it turns out, it's directly connected to the live-action Jurassic World films. According to showrunner Scott Kreamer, the wild, cliffhanger ending of Season 1, which ties in with the events of the last two movies, is 100% part of the Jurassic World canon.

WARNING: This article contains major spoilers for the first season of Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous! Continue reading at your own risk...

Camp Cretaceous takes place around the same time as Jurassic World, when Isla Nublar was open to the public as a destination. Of course, in the movie, all of that tourism comes to a halt when dinosaurs get loose and the island is deemed too dangerous. That mass evacuation is depicted at the end of Camp Cretaceous, but the six teenagers on the show are too late to make the boats. The island is evacuated without them.

"That is the conceit of the show, that when the U.N. quarantine is put into place, six kids got left behind and we get to find out what happens to them," Kreamer explained during an interview with io9. "This is considered canon. The director of Jurassic World, Colin Trevorrow, was very involved, continuously—as far as story, as far as canon, and as far as designs. All sorts of things. Everything that's onscreen was approved by Colin, and Frank Marshall, and Steven Spielberg. So yes, this is considered full canon."

In the time between Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the island is run solely by dinosaurs. That's the world these kids will have to exist in if/when Season 2 arrives. It also raises questions as to how they eventually get off the island. If you recall, in Fallen Kingdom, the entire island is destroyed. Surely the kids make it off before then, right?

Surprisingly, this tie to the films didn't cause any problems for the creative team behind the show. During a roundtable discussion about the series, both Kreamer and Trevorrow insisted that they had quite a lot of freedom to play with these ideas.

"There's always pitches of something that would be super cool. But, we knew what we were doing when we started and we specifically knew this was the parameter," Kreamer said. "I don't know if we spent a lot of time on that. I'm sure there was a wild pitch here and there of something that would have blown the continuity out of the water, but nothing comes to my mind just because, when we set out to do this, we knew the beginning and the end of the story. And we also knew we knew the film really well."

"Yeah, I didn't want to handcuff these guys to the movie. That was really what it was," Trevorrow added. "I feel like there may have been some things, just based on the general set of just the tenants of the franchise and these things that we try to stick to, and especially when it comes to the dinosaurs being real animals and not amorphized, and not turned into monsters. That's something that we talk about a lot, but in general, it was probably the first thing that I said when I came in was, 'This is your show.' And you're not just making some kind of an addendum to a movie. You're telling an original story in the context of this movie. And they really ran with it."

What did you think of Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous? Let us know in the comments!

The first season of Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous is now streaming on Netflix. Jurassic World: Dominion, the third film in the Jurassic World trilogy, will be arriving in theaters on June 11, 2021.