In a surprising move, the original three Jurassic Park movies are heading over to Netflix from Peacock at the end of this month. Given that NBCUniversal’s Peacock only launched last week, it’s a bit strange that they’re already losing the rights to the three films. The new service, which is also losing The Matrix and Shrek movies at the end of the month, still have plenty of content to fall back on, though, as well as next-day streaming premieres of NBC shows.
The original 1993 Jurassic Park remains one of the most successful and loved blockbusters, with Steven Spielberg providing both innovative special effects and a compelling story that drove the film to be one of the most successful of all time, and a major influence on Hollywood to date. 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park isn’t as well-regarded, although it still has a lot of fans.
Spielberg returned to direct The Lost World, which includes a T-Rex smashing it up in San Diego. Although the special effects remained stellar, the sequel suffers under the pressure of following up its iconic predecessor. Jurassic Park III then arrived in 2001, this time with Joe Johnston in the directing chair, and departed from the Michael Crichton novels that had been the source material for the first two movies.
The original Jurassic Park trilogy returns to Netflix US on August 1 pic.twitter.com/bfkY43DJQH
— Netflix (@netflix) July 20, 2020
Rights to the original Jurassic Park trilogy have always been big business for studio Universal, even to the point of successful theatrical re-releases. The trilogy initially appeared on Netflix in 2016 as well, before its brief move over to Peacock. Given that Universal own the rights to the franchise, and Peacock is now the streaming arm of NBCUniversal, it does make sense that the new service would have a brief hold over the movies before the rights go back to Netflix.
Either way, anyone who’s missed watching the original Jurassic Park trilogy on Netflix won’t have long to wait until the titles are available to stream again. In terms of the more recent films in the franchise, Jurassic World doesn’t currently seem to be streaming as part of a subscription, but Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is available via DirecTV.
