Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World boasted an ingenious concept that saw it land firmly in the middle ground between sequel and reboot. It imagined a world over two decades on from the original where John Hammond’s dream had finally become a reality, with millions of annual visitors heading on vacation to a theme park that boasted dinosaurs as the main attraction.
Of course, anyone that’s seen any of the first three films knew it wouldn’t end well, and shockingly enough, the prehistoric creatures ended up going on the rampage once again. And while Jurassic World may have been heavily indebted to nostalgia, it didn’t lean on it too heavily, although the T-Rex from Steven Spielberg’s opener did return and save the day during the third act.
Trevorrow recently teased that the first footage from Dominion will be arriving sooner rather than later, and as expected, it’s coming attached to Fast & Furious 9. However, there’s a catch for a couple of reasons. Not only will it exclusively screen prior to IMAX showings of F9, but it’s a five-minute scene set during the Cretaceous period that delves into the origin story of the iconic T-Rex.
In a new interview, the filmmaker teased what’s in store from the footage, and it sounds like it’ll be a mixture of the standard big budget spectacle and a little more scientific accuracy than we’ve been used to seeing from the extended Jurassic universe.
“It was always part of the story. I really wanted to not just tell an origin story for the T-Rex that we love, but to really put into visual terms this story that we’ve been told for 30 years about how dinosaurs were made from DNA fossilized in amber. Sometimes we put a human face on things, I wanted to put a dinosaur’s face on things and see what actually went down. And now canonically we know that the dinosaur that we love, the T-Rex, was brutally murdered by the Giganotosaurus. And that’s part of the story we’re telling for the film.
We have our first feathered dinosaur, the Oviraptor. I feel like that’s going to be a bit of a headline for those who care about paleontological accuracy. Another one is the Moros intrepidus. That one showed up maybe two years ago. It probably popped up into your feed, that people found a tiny, T-Rex-like feathered dinosaur. And that was one of the quickest turnarounds that we’ve had, from discovery to putting it on screen.
We start with the Dreadnoughtus, which was discovered not long ago, those bones. And it’s one of the great things about being able to rip dinosaurs from the headlines, that we’re able to see something exciting and do some research on it, then build a model and put it in the movies. The Quetzalcoatlus, which we’ve never seen before, which is much bigger than a Pteranodon. We’re following this massive Quetzalcoatlus, and then it lands and you see all these Pteranodons at its feet like birds, and you realize how big the thing is.”
Jurassic World: Dominion is still a year away, so it might be too soon for a full-length trailer to kick off the promotional campaign, but fans will surely be more than happy with an exclusive five-minute scene without a human character in sight to tide them over.
