The dinosaurs are coming back — but not the way we remember them.
With Jurassic World Rebirth, Universal is hitting the reset button. This isn’t just another loud sequel in a franchise full of collapsing theme parks and dino chase scenes. Under director Gareth Edwards, the next entry in the Jurassic saga is being positioned as a more grounded, awe-driven return to what made 1993’s Jurassic Park a classic.
“It really does feel that it’s welcoming people to really celebrate the original film,” said star Jonathan Bailey in Empire’s exclusive coverage. “It has that wonder and awe, while not being scared to re-inject the thrill and the fear.” Bailey plays paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis, one of three leads sent on a mission into a dinosaur-inhabited jungle to recover precious DNA — alongside Scarlett Johansson’s covert ops specialist Zora Bennett, and Mahershala Ali’s stoic survivor Duncan Kincaid.
Rather than another theme park setting, Rebirth will explore a previously unseen island where InGen’s most dangerous genetic experiments were left to fester. Filming took place in the dense jungles of Thailand, trading digital gloss for practical danger. “There were really dangerous water snakes swimming past us,” Bailey recalled. “So the fear and adrenaline was as real as it could be.”
Johansson echoed the shift in tone. “It hearkens back to the first one,” she told Empire. “It has a lot of good jump-scares, and the stakes are high.” Between the tight jungle setting and the back-to-basics approach, Rebirth seems to be dialing back the spectacle and dialing up the tension.
A New Predator Stalks the Island: The D-Rex
But even longtime fans might not be ready for the film’s headline attraction — a brand-new apex predator, twisted in more ways than one.
Say hello to the Distortus Rex — or D-Rex for short. “It’s kind of like if the T-Rex was designed by H.R. Giger, and then that whole thing had sex with a Rancor,” Edwards told Empire. This genetically engineered terror is expected to be both horrifying and oddly tragic — a creature with six limbs, visible deformities, and what and seems weighed down by how messed up it is.
David Vickery of ILM, who helped bring the beast to life, described it as “if another animal has been wrapped around the T-Rex.” The goal, he said, was to inspire not just fear, but empathy: “Its deformities have caused it some pain, and there’s an encumbrance to it.”
Also set to debut are the Mutadons — a nightmarish fusion of pterosaur and raptor. Screenwriter David Koepp, returning to the franchise after writing Jurassic Park and The Lost World, explained that these creatures stem from the darker corners of InGen’s lab work. “We saw in some of the previous Jurassic World movies that their experiments made dinosaurs bigger, meaner, scarier, and it occurred to me and Steven [Spielberg] that those can’t all have gone well. Sometimes, life shouldn’t have found a way.” he said.
Whether these new creations will join the pantheon of iconic Jurassic beasts remains to be seen, but one thing’s certain: this summer, the dinosaurs aren’t just back — they’ve evolved into something stranger.
Jurassic World Rebirth opens in cinemas worldwide July 2.
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