The ‘Jurassic' rebirth that never happened: How an Oscar-nominated screenwriter almost took the franchise in a wild new direction

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2 days ago

Jurassic World: Rebirth stomps into theaters this holiday weekend, looking to sink its teeth into the July 4 box office and revitalize a franchise that even the most dedicated dino-heads would agree is starting to feel a little prehistoric. Starring Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, and Mahershala Ali, the seventh film in the Jurassic series unfolds on a new island where dinosaurs roam freely... and humans are prey.
While the Rebirth reviews are mixed, the movie posted a $28 million opening day, with a projected $127.5 million gross over the four-day weekend. The Rotten Tomatoes audience scores are also coming in a smidgen higher than the Tomatometer, indicating that these digitally enhanced dinosaurs continue to be a big summer movie draw.
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But Jurassic still seems like a franchise in need of some fresh creative DNA. And, as it happens, a bold new direction emerged in the early 2000s from an unlikely source — Oscar-nominated screenwriter and pioneering independent filmmaker John Sayles. In the wake of 2001's underwhelming Jurassic Park III, the writer-director of critically adored dramas like Eight Men Out, Return of the Secaucus Seven, and Matewan was hired to pen Jurassic Park IV, and the wild result — which you can still find online — remains one of the greatest "what ifs?" in Hollywood blockbuster history.
Here's a look back at how the Jurassic series was nearly reborn in a very different way two decades ago, long before Rebirth.
At first glance, Jurassic Park would seem to have little in common with the thematically weighty adult dramas that were Sayles's stock in trade. Starting with 1980's Return of the Secaucus 7, the Schenectady, N.Y.-born filmmaker won acclaim and awards attention for films like Baby It's You, City of Hope and Limbo. His Oscar track record included Best Original Screenplay nominations for 1992's Passion Fish and 1996's Lone Star.
But in between passion projects, Sayles made a living as a writer and script doctor for hire specializing in genre fare. His first credited screenplay is producer Roger Corman's Jaws rip-off, Piranha, and Sayles also penned Alligator and The Howling and later did punch-up drafts on Apollo 13 and Mimic. In the early '80s, he was hired by Steven Spielberg to flesh out a script called Night Skies that, according to Hollywood legend, was the early genesis for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
Spielberg, of course, went on to launch the Jurassic franchise with 1993's inaugural entry and its 1997 sequel, The Lost World before handing the third installment to The Rocketeer's Joe Johnston. As development began on Jurassic Park IV, screenwriter William Monahan — who later won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for The Departed — was brought on to offer his take. But Spielberg seemed to think that the next installment would require a little bit of the genre art and science that only Sayles could provide.
The Sayles draft of Jurassic Park IV takes audiences back to where it all began — the island of Isla Nublar, where Wayne Knight's duplicitous smuggler Dennis Nedry lost that can of shaving cream hiding John Hammond's propriety reptile DNA while walking through the jungle in the rain. (Cue up Weird Al's "Jurassic Park" anthem now.)
Eager to get those samples back, Hammond dispatches mercenary Nick Harris on a search-and-recovery mission with the intention of creating a new strain of dinosaurs that can't reproduce, but can serve as a check on the marauding giant lizards that have already escaped their confines.
Harris locates Nedry's missing shaving cream, but also discovers that he's not alone on Isla Nublar. The island is now in the control of the Grendel Corporation, which has its own designs on that DNA. The mercenary is eventually captured and flown to a remote castle in Switzerland where he learns Grendel's endgame — creating a squad of lethal soldiers that are made up of dog, dinosaur, and human genetic material.
Faster than you can say "lizard people," though, that army turns on their creators as Nick aids them in bringing the Grendel Corporation down. In the closing moments, Harris announces that he returning the missing embryos to Hammond as a loose dino chomps down on the last remaining bad guy.
Reading the script now, you can't argue that Jurassic Park IV isn't in the spirit of the loosey-goosey genre movies that Sayles once wrote for Corman. But that's ultimately not the spirit that a big budget Hollywood franchise like Jurassic Park was seeking in the early 2000s.
Ultimately, the Jurassic franchise took an extended time-out, finally relaunching in 2015 with Jurassic World, directed by Colin Trevorrow, who admitted to reading — and enjoying — the never-made Sayles script. "I liked it in a lot of ways," he told ScreenCrush that year. "What was going on was bananas, but that's not a bad thing! My movie is bananas. There's a lot in there to like. It's nuts in a lot of the right ways."
And, as some dino sleuths have noted, several of the ideas contained in Sayles's script found their way into the Jurassic World movies in different forms. Chris Pratt's Owen Grady, for example, is a former Navy lieutenant who squads up with his own crew of Velociraptors. And much of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom unfolds in a secluded estate housing a cavernous research facility where new strains of battle-ready dinosaurs are being engineered and sold to the highest bidders.
In a 2016 interview with Indiewire, Sayles spoke briefly about his brush with Jurassic and his approach to genre fare in general. "Genre can be used for all kinds of purposes," he noted. "Sometimes you can just do straight genre ... and other times, you can kind of subvert it a little bit. I'm more interested in the ones that are a little more self-conscious."
"They could probably shoot the script that I wrote today and it would different enough from what they did make," Sayles added. With an eighth Jurassic film likely already in development, here's a second chance for Universal to make an installment that has an Oscar nominee's fingerprints all over it.Best of Gold Derby
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