Big budget blockbusters certainly don’t come cheap, especially if the main selling point involves dinosaurs wreaking havoc and causing chaos for the human members of the cast. Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park was made for a relatively thrifty $63 million back in 1993, but as visual effects technology advances and audiences constantly demand more in terms of scope and scale, costs have risen exponentially.
Jurassic World came armed with a budget of $150 million, while sequel Fallen Kingdom was even more expensive at $170 million. The third entry in the new trilogy upped the ante higher still with the production given the green light at a price tag $200 million, but Jurassic World: Dominion is now set to cost a whole lot more as it’s implementing rigorous health and safety protocols after becoming one of the first major Hollywood projects to resume shooting after being shut down due to the Coronavirus pandemic.
Everyone in the industry needs to adhere to the strict rules if they want to get back to work, and Dominion is pulling out all the stops when it comes to guaranteeing the safety of the cast and crew. In fact, a new report indicates that almost $3 million has been spent on the testing process so far, and producer Patrick Crowley admitted that while it poses some new challenges, ensuring a safe environment remains the studio’s top priority.
“Universal never blinked. They said, ‘You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do’. When you get up and running, you realize that you need to go over and talk to that crew person and say, ‘Buddy, put the mask up over your nose’. Or you find the three guys who are just 18 inches away from each other talking about what a great time they had last weekend, and you have to break it up. We have people who are hired to do nothing but go, ‘You need to get 2 meters away from him’, because you know that the success of the show and the likelihood of them continuing to have jobs in the industry is dependent on that. It can be a nightmare. All of a sudden you have four people who aren’t able to go to work and you have to figure out a workaround but if we don’t stick by the rule, we don’t have any uniform way of assuring accountability.”
Dwayne Johnson may have claimed his Netflix actioner Red Notice has the most aggressive testing in Hollywood, but Jurassic World: Dominion doesn’t seem to be too far behind having hired out an entire hotel so that the crew are all in the same place, as well as processing over 27,000 tests. It might have put the budget up, but the last two movies both earned at least $1.3 billion at the box office, so it isn’t like studio are losing any sleep over their profit margins.