Jurassic World: Dominion may be getting back into production now following a lengthy Coronavirus-related delay, but no matter how great the sixth installment in the long-running franchise could possibly turn out to be, they could make another fifty of these movies and none of them would be able to hold a candle to the original.
Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park is quite simply one of the greatest blockbusters that will ever be made, a near-perfect storm of a high-concept pitch married to jaw-dropping action sequences created with a mix of full-size animatronics and cutting-edge visual effects that still hold up nearly three decades later, and an ensemble cast that inhabited their roles so well that they’re still not done with the series yet.
The script is littered with iconic lines of dialogue, but one of the most memorable is Samuel L. Jackson’s most famous contribution to the movie. Most people would simply assume that it was always a part of the screenplay, but in a recent interview, writer David Koepp revealed that none other than Robert Zemeckis was the inspiration behind “hold on to your butts.”
“I was finishing Death Becomes Her when I was writing Jurassic Park, and we had an ending that was really disastrous at first, from one of these horrible test screenings where they almost kill you. So we’d very quickly gone out to shoot a new ending for the movie. So this was it, this really had to work. And we sat down in the dailies, and as the lights were going down, Bob Zemeckis said, ‘Hold on to your butts’. I happened to be working on the script at that time, and I was like, ‘Oh, I love that’. I went back and I typed it into the script immediately, and then Sam Jackson said it. I don’t think I ever told Zemeckis that, but that’s his line.”
As strange as it sounds, the director of Back to the Future came up with one of Jurassic Park‘s most iconic soundbites as he and his creative team rushed to put the finishing touches on a forgotten dark comedy, one that wound up making little over a tenth of what Spielberg’s dinosaur epic would go on to earn at the box office less than twelve months later. Luckily for Koepp, Zemeckis seems to have forgotten that he’d even said it or he might have been knocking on his door to try and get himself a slice of the profits.
