How ‘Jurassic World Rebirth’ Became ‘A Whole New Chapter in This Franchise’ (Exclusive)

For Gareth Edwards, the closest you can get to a real skull island on planet Earth is Thailand. The director of Godzilla (2014) and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) ferried Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, Mahershala Ali, Rupert Friend and the rest of his cast to shoot Jurassic World Rebirth in Southeast Asia. He describes the variety of geography as “very primeval,” which is what you want for a movie full of dinosaurs.

“I’m allowed to say it now that we’re on the other side of it, but we shot in rivers and these mangrove swamps,” Edwards tells Weekly entertainment. “When we scouted for them, we saw venomous water snakes, massive ones that we had to catch. We kept it quiet from the actors as they spent a whole day wading through the same area. And there were giant spiders that were poisonous and stuff on the edge of the trees. You just wouldn’t point at them if you saw them. Just keep going!”

For the scenes shot at sea, they then went to Malta. The filmmaker mentions “some water stunts” they needed to do in a tank, but then they filmed boatloads (pun intended) on the Mediterranean. “It’s probably the last film I ever shot in the ocean because it was very difficult,” he admits. “I’m glad we persevered, but I think everyone, all the actors, went through as crazy a journey as the characters in the film, these very physically demanding, sometimes near-death experiences that had these high reward factors, if it managed to succeed.”

These locations were part of the “back to basics” approach to the film. As the title suggests, the next one Jurassic World the sequel, which hits theaters on July 2, 2025, is a “rebirth” of sorts for the franchise. Not that it necessarily needed one. People still flock to theaters to see dinosaurs on the big screen; the last three each crossed $1 billion at the global box office. Still, since 2015’s entry, which kicked off a new trilogy starring Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, critical acclaim has drifted steadily downward. The last installment, 2022 Dominionwith its reunion of Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, earned about half as much as the first Jurassic World in the US alone, but at the end of the day it still crossed the billion mark worldwide. The team behind Rebirth hopes to recapture the magic of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic with real shooting locations, less blue screen and a fairly simple but compelling story with fresh leads.

“I can’t speak for Universal, but it felt like a new trilogy in a way,” says Edwards. “I’m not sure what their plans are, but it felt like the beginning of a whole new chapter in this franchise. To me, it’s a huge love letter to Steven Spielberg and his previous films. There are moments in this film that remind me a lot about Jaws. It’s like little greatest hits of all the aspects of his movies that I loved growing up as a kid. It’s basically a little adventure odyssey across this island, a story of survival, really.”

Johansson, Ali and Bailey are basically the new faces at Jurassic World. Five years after the events of Dominionwhere dinosaurs intermingled with humans across the globe, these creatures are now dying out. The present planet proved inhospitable to the prehistoric likeness, except for a small area in the tropics around the equator, where many of them now congregate. The three most colossal dinosaurs on land, sea, and air in this biosphere have genetic material valuable to a pharmaceutical company that hopes to use the dino DNA to create a life-saving drug for humanity.

Zora Bennett (Johansson), whom Edwards describes as “a special-ops, ex-CIA type,” is contracted by said company to infiltrate the region and extract the DNA from these monoliths. She has a sibling-like bond with Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala), her most trusted ally, who is the captain of their team’s ship — “He’s kind of like our movie Ahab,” Edwards says. Bailey is a paleontologist, Dr. Henry Loomis. “He’s out of his depth on the military element of the mission,” explains the director. “He’s very comfortable on digs and expeditions, but not the life-and-death risks that Kincaid and Zora get into.”

Edwards compares the trio’s dynamic to Brody, Hooper and Quint from Jawsplayed in the 1975 Spielberg classic by Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw – disparate individuals hunting a prehistoric creature. “It’s kind of a triangle between three different overlapping characters,” he says. “There’s a lot of fun between the three of them that really stood out to me. It’s less of a love triangle and more of a competitive ‘who’s the alpha of the group?’ in a way.”

And that guy walking through wetlands in a white collared shirt? It is Martin Krebs (Friend), a representative of Big Pharma, on the scene to protect his company’s interests. But even he, Edwards points out, is not the clichéd corporate figure. “Rupert has a bit of James Bond about him,” he says. “They all tried to play against type a little bit.”

The curveball to the story, written by original Jurassic Park writer David Koepp, is that Zora’s team receives a mayday signal from a civilian boat that capsized after an attack. So in addition to carrying out this dangerous mission, the crew must now worry about the safety of the Delgado family, played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (The Lincoln Lawyer), Luna Blaise (Manifesto), David Iacono (The summer I became beautiful), and Audrina Miranda (Lopez vs. López).

“Obviously, it all goes wrong and becomes a situation you enjoy watching as one Jurassic damn,” notes Edwards. “Once you’re on an adventure, the film doesn’t let loose until the end credits. The joy of it is in the moment-to-moment chase, flight, fright, horror, curveballs throughout the plot of set pieces and dinosaur moments.”

Edwards is on a mission of his own: to capture the essence of what he loved about Spielberg’s Jurassic Parka seminal piece of cinema that had an immediate impact on Edwards’ career as a filmmaker; he decided to work with visual effects, partly as a result of his viewing experience. “Jurassic Park led the way with computer graphics, but I feel like we got lost along the way with the arms race for a play,” he elaborates. “Jurassic actually only had a few dozen VFX shots in it and it’s such a powerful film. So it was trying to go back to all the tricks and ideas that tease the audience, that create suspense and excitement that gets you on the edge of your seat. I just wanted to create the feeling I had when I was young, of being in awe of these things.”

And if that means wading through poisonous snake-infested waters to get the shot, so be it.