The Jurassic World franchise started several decades ago, with Steven Spielberg’s celebrated Jurassic Park series of films featuring Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum in central roles. Those movies redefined blockbusters in terms of giant monster special effects and made stars out of their actors.
Now, Dern, Neill, and Goldblum are getting ready to rejoin the world of dinosaur mayhem with major roles in Jurassic World 3. Goldblum couldn’t be happier with the news, either, and shared his joy via Instagram with the post below:
The actor had reprised his role as Dr. Malcolm from Jurassic Park in the second installment of Jurassic World in a brief cameo, and fans have been speculating ever since that the cameo was a set-up for a larger role in the franchise somewhere down the line. It turns out they were right, and director Colin Trevorrow recently revealed just how important including Goldblum and the other actors who kickstarted Jurassic Park all those decades ago was to him:
“We felt like this was [Ian] Malcolm’s return….Let him have his moment,” Trevorrow said on MTV’s Seen It, Spill It. “I feel that way about everyone, especially Laura … she never got to have her own movie. That identified as being something that’s important. We just wanted to put the spotlight on [Goldblum].”
Now, fans of the original series, as well as the more recent films, will get to have the best of both worlds when Dr. Malcolm, Dr. Sattler and Dr. Grant from Jurassic Park meet Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard’s characters in the next movie while dealing with a world that’s opened the floodgates to dinosaurs, with the original island that housed the gigantic species having been destroyed and the dinos transported to mainland USA.
It seems that Universal Pictures, while choosing to strike out with a fresh cast in the original Jurassic World, is hoping to once again lean hard into the nostalgia with the return of the veteran actors. It remains to be seen whether this tactic will infuse fresh life into the T-rex-heavy franchise that hasn’t yet managed to rise to the heights set by the previous movies under Spielberg in terms of popularity, but we’re certainly keeping our fingers crossed that it does.