A fossil is trapped in amber in the new poster for Jurassic World Dominion, which comes out this summer.
The classic motif is a throwback to the very first Jurassic Park film from 1993, which centered around the frighteningly plausible scenario of scientists reverse engineering dinosaurs by extracting their still-preserved DNA found in the blood in the belly of an ancient mosquito who is perfectly preserved in a chunk of fossilized tree resin.
“The epic conclusion of the Jurassic era” is the tagline that appears on the poster, which was dropped Thursday by the official Jurassic World Twitter account. In this new reimagining of the hardened amber image, it is not an insect, but the T-rex, which serves as the franchise’s logo encased in the translucent golden rock.
Jurassic World Dominion is the third installment of the Jurassic World franchise, a sub-series of the Jurassic franchise.
Over the years, the films have gotten increasingly less “frighteningly plausible,” though the plot of the Steven Spielberg original of a theme park with dinosaurs getting ready to open in a Caribbean island was already a stretch, to begin with.
However, audiences were willing to suspend their disbelief just a little bit more when 2015’s Jurassic World softly rebooted the franchise, under the steady direction of Colin Trevorrow, with a storyline involving the Isla Nublar tourist attraction now being open to the public and in full swing.
The film was a monstrous success, becoming the eighth highest-grossing movie of all time domestically, with a box office haul of over $652 million. Worldwide, the film grossed $1.6 billion and is currently number seven on that list.
The sequel, 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, fell a bit further down on the list, becoming the 30th highest-grossing film of all time in the U.S. The film’s over $417 million it was able to tear from the wallets of American moviegoers was certainly nothing to scoff at, and worldwide it was able to take a bite out of $1.3 billion, making it the 16th movie of all time in the global arena.
But critically speaking, the sequel was much less of a success with reviewers and the general public. The film, directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, was a sort of Dracula film riff, with the story mostly taking place in a spooky mansion and the heroes being stalked by a super-intelligent dinosaur lurking in the shadows, a premise that apparently did not resonate well with moviegoers.
Now that Trevorrow is once again in the director’s chair and a plot centering around dinosaurs widely roaming modern-day earth, our expectations are high that Jurassic World Dominion may return the series to its popcorn-fodder roots when it drops in theaters June 10. The addition of legacy franchise stars Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum — as can be seen in the latest trailer — certainly won’t hurt its chances.
