Let It Die: Jurassic Park

https://lebeauleblog.com/2018/07/08/let-it-die-jurassic-park/

There’s no such thing as a surefire hit in Hollywood. Just ask Lucasfilm where there is surely much head-scratching over Solo, the first bomb in Star Wars history. Every movie is a gamble and these days the major studios have been playing almost exclusively at the high stakes table. If you’re a studio executive trying to hold on to your high-paying job, you’re likely more interest in low-risk/high reward projects than you are in making art. That’s where movie franchises come in.

Conventional wisdom used to be that each successive sequel cost more to make and earned less than its predecessor. In the eighties and nineties, it was relatively rare for a movie franchise to stretch beyond a trilogy. But these days, familiar properties are more attractive than ever. Studio heads are so desperate for presold material that they will revive long dead franchises or reboot a series that previously would have been allowed to go dormant. It seems like once a movie has been successful, audiences will be subjected to sequels forever.

Which brings me to the point of Let It Die. When you get down to it, most hit movies are lucky if they have enough story to fill two hours much less an infinite series of sequels, prequels, spin-offs and reboots. Endings are underrated. In this series I am going to look at movie series that Hollywood should just let die already.


Which brings me to Jurassic Park. Steven Spielberg’s original adaptation of Michael Crichton’s about a theme park filled with dinosaurs is considered by many to be a classic. The concept for the story was so appealing that several studios got into a bidding war over the rights before the novel was even published. (Never mind that Crichton was essentially ripping off his own idea for Westworld with dinosaurs instead of robotic cowboys.) Universal was so certain that they had a hit on their hands that they started designing theme park attractions based on the movie three years before it was released! As it turns out, they were right. Jurassic Park was the highest-grossing movie of 1993 and twenty-five years later it is still beloved by many.

When a movie tops the box office the way Jurassic Park did, sequels are inevitable. So it was not surprising that four years later Lost World served up another dino romp. Typically you would have expected a Jurassic Park sequel to be rushed out into theaters as quickly as possible, but Steven Spielberg decided to direct the second movie himself which is unusual. Aside from the Indiana Jones movies, Spielberg has not directed a lot of sequels. He passed on Jaws 2 and later regretted his decision but never enough to return to the Jaws franchise. E.T. started out as a sequel to Close Encounters which Spielberg intended to produce rather than direct. But when it morphed into something more personal, he took over helming duties. E.T. was for a time the highest grossing movie in history, but Spielberg refused to film a sequel. He has stated in interviews that factored into his decision to direct Lost World. He felt that if he denied fans a follow-up to E.T. he owed them another Jurassic Park.