There are some things you’ll see constantly in movie theaters across the country. There’s no shortage of features using “Born to be Wild” or “Fortune Son” needle drops, for one thing. Hagiographic imagery fellating the military industry complex is also common in American cinema. For a time in the 2000s, watching a comedy movie meant getting consistently assaulted by the “jokes” of Rob Schneider, Vince Vaughn, and Dane Cook. 2006 was a scary time.
But unless it’s time for Universal Pictures to crank out a new Jurassic Park/World installment, dinosaurs aren’t something people see all that often on the big screen. These prehistoric critters are in the public domain. Anyone can use them. Yet Jurassic Park has provided such an immense shadow that only the occasional 65 has attempted to deliver major big screen storytelling centered on these creatures. Must this status quo endure? Can we not get more dinosaur cinema flowing through our veins?
Granted, Hollywood might be more open to making dinosaur movies if there wasn’t a poor track record for such titles that don’t feature those beloved John Williams leitmotifs. Dinosaur films outside of the Jurassic Park installments have often gone belly-up financially, especially in the modern world. Disney’s Dinosaur in May 2000 didn’t do badly in raw grosses. However, it didn’t become the megahit the Mouse House wanted. 15 years later, Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur was the first flop for the house that Toy Story built. 65 came and went in a flash in March 2023 while Walking with Dinosaurs 3D and its infamously last-minute celebrity voice work crated at the box office in December 2013.
That’s the kind of track record that convinces studio executives that unless a dinosaur movie is following in the footsteps of Ellie Satler and company (or if it’s an Ice Age installment), it’ll flop. However, all those features had box office performances plagued by far bigger problems than just the presence of dinosaurs. The Good Dinosaur didn’t get strong reviews nor did its marketing resonate much with adults. Walking with Dinosaurs 3D got trampled by Frozen over the holiday season 2013. Meanwhile, 65 was capsized simply because Adam Driver isn’t a movie star. All these motion pictures flopping is a quirky commonality rather than a referendum on dinosaur movies being inherently cursed at the box office.
Even with this and other problems (such as the inherent costliness of non-Asylum/SyFy Channel dinosaur movies), though, dinosaurs really should be more common in our cinema landscape. For one thing, the Jurassic Park movies have been out of creative steam for years. Though the original 1993 film is a masterpiece, there’s never been a sublime or even especially noteworthy Jurassic Park sequel. For the last decade, this saga has been treading creative water as the Jurassic World installments hesitate to fully commit to excitingly wild ideas like “dinosaurs invading the human world.” There’s a void for enthrallingly fresh dinosaur cinema that some new filmmakers could exploit.
Part of that void is finally giving the world a movie that focuses on dinosaurs who can’t talk. Whether it’s The Land Before Time, Walking with Dinosaurs 3D, or Dinosaur, Hollywood keeps chickening out on committing to feature-length movies focusing on just dinosaurs who speak only in grunts, squeaks, or roars. This worry about “alienating” moviegoers runs afoul of Roger Ebert’s beloved quote that cinema is “a machine for empathy.” Movies are all about immersing us in lives and experiences that aren’t our own. Do we really need wisecracking lemurs riffing about “the love monkey” or Laura Dern saying “he slid into my DM’s!” to make dinosaur movies emotionally compelling?
Let the dinosaurs be silent and anchor countless Hollywood movies! Gertie the Dinosaur or the dinos in Fantasia’s “Rite of Spring” segment are infinitely more compelling than Jurassic World humans like Owen Grady or Maisie Lockwood. The only way to make more characters and motion pictures living up to the legacy of those beasts is by making way more dinosaur features.
A greater array of dinosaur movies could also open up exciting visual possibilities. Despite paleontology constantly evolving our perceptions of what dinosaurs look like, the Jurassic World movies and the scarce few other dinosaur features are still adhering to a vision of dinosaurs as reptilian creatures inhabiting a very limited color palette. Even 65 suffered from this problem, not to mention designs that were trying to simultaneously not just regurgitate the default Jurassic Park designs but still wanted to remind people of those beasts. Just look at 65’s off-putting T-Rex covered in grey scales and walking on all fours(?!?).
Perish the thought of feathered dinos or reveling in vivid, colorful hues for these creatures. Jurassic World Rebirth’s drably colored Distortus-Rex had an anemic design, cementing that the current visual scheme for cinematic dinosaurs has run its course. Further new dinosaur movies, though, could really go hog wild on the creature designs for these dinosaurs. Imagine the possibilities in these titles embracing both newly discovered physical traits of dinosaurs and colors not ubiquitous in the modern wilderness.
You can’t beat the original Jurassic Park’s magnificently realized dinosaurs. Instead of trying to repeat those greatest hits like Rebirth and 65 did, a fresh era of dinosaur cinema could blaze exciting, new visual trails for dinosaurs on-screen.
Perhaps the most alluring aspect of seeing more dinosaurs in cinema is how it could usher in more exciting, maximalist, and stylized cinema. The Jurassic World sequels constantly hedged their bets on getting too silly. That’s why Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’s “dinosaurs live in the real world!” cliffhanger petered out into a bunch of locusts. That’s a byproduct of an American cinema scene that’s often too timid to get weird or audacious. For every Sinners (a movie brimming with visual and narrative confidence), there’s a Snow White ironing out cartoony Dwarfs into realistically CG monstrosities or a realistically animated Lion King remake draining all personality from its digital felines.
Making more movies that focus on dinosaurs, though, would make gripping onto yawn-worthy “realism” already a fool’s errand. Dinosaurs no longer exist. We can’t immediately reference what their exact behavior would be like. You have to use your imagination to realize them on-screen. Keep exploiting that imagination to produce visuals, narrative beats, and enthralling moments heretofore unseen on screen before. B-movies like Velocipastor or Tammy and the T-Rex demonstrate what kind of excitingly unhinged dinosaur cinema can exist when filmmakers embrace sock puppet arms over “realism.”
Now that Jurassic World Rebirth is a moneymaker, let’s get not only more dinosaur movies out there, but one’s willing to channel aesthetics more reminiscent of RRR than Jurassic World Dominion. Despite what Jurassic Park’s tragically lackluster sequels suggest, good dinosaur movies aren’t extinct. Giving filmmakers more opportunities to make dinosaur features could prove that truth and make new movies to sit alongside the likes of Velocipastor or the original Jurassic Park.
