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35 minutes ago
- Yahoo
The ‘Jurassic' rebirth that never happened: How an Oscar-nominated screenwriter almost took the franchise in a wild new direction
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. More from Gold Derby Kesha's 'Period': What critics are saying about the singer's first independent album Michael Madsen remembered: All his Oscar-nominated films, from 'WarGames' to 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood' 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 of Gold Derby Everything to know about 'The Batman 2': Returning cast, script finalized Tom Cruise movies: 17 greatest films ranked worst to best 'It was wonderful to be on that ride': Christian Slater talks his beloved roles, from cult classics ('Heathers,' 'True Romance') to TV hits ('Mr. Robot,' 'Dexter: Original Sin') Click here to read the full article.
Yahoo
36 minutes ago
- Yahoo
The controversy over the champion ‘Jeopardy' couple: A brief explainer
On Tuesday, Jason Singer won $22,401 on Jeopardy four years after his wife, Susan McMillan, claimed a $35,600 cash prize of her own. Several media outlets celebrated the couple as the show's first married champions. It turns out, they weren't. Here's a brief explainer on how the sweet story turned sour. More from Gold Derby Kesha's 'Period': What critics are saying about the singer's first independent album Michael Madsen remembered: All his Oscar-nominated films, from 'WarGames' to 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood' Before Singer's win, publications were touting the history-making potential. For example, a June 30 headline from People proclaimed: "Married Jeopardy! Contestants Hope to Be First Husband and Wife Winners: 'History Is at Stake'" Then after his win, ABC's Good Morning America ran a segment on the couple with a slight caveat, stating on air, "The Jeopardy team is confirming that Jason and Susan may just be the first-ever already married Jeopardy champions." When George Stephanopoulos questioned the use of the word "may" in the statement, Lara Spencer responded that the game show doesn't do "deep dives into last names or private lives in that regard." Meanwhile, past married winners began to grumble about the inaccurate news reports, beginning with 2015 winner Kristin Sausville, who is married to 2011 champ Justin Sausville. She took to Facebook on Wedenesday and wrote that she was "really bothered" by the misinformation. "There is something really surreal and honestly kind of sinister in watching part of yourself be erased in real time," she said. She has since received an outpouring of support on social media. Sausville added, "The local media for the guy last night took up the story and ran with it, and then other media picked it up and ran it without checking for accuracy, and now it's everywhere. Now that the bots have the story, it would be impossible to correct them all, even if I cared enough to take the time to do so. I'm sure it's a matter of weeks before AI like ChatGPT and Google will give you them as the answer to the question, based on the sheer volume of bot activity. It's really Orwellian to watch how easily it's happening." She summed up her feelings by stating, "At the end of the day, I'm not all 'but my LEGACY!' about it, but I am really bothered by seeing how quickly misinformation can be spread and accepted as truth. We should keep that in mind for everything we see online and particularly via AI." A rep for Jeopardy has confirmed that the show does not track such records and said that other coupled winners aside from the Suasvilles have since been identified. Singer, a real estate agent from Portland, Maine, has acknowledged that he and his wife have not made history. He told the Portland Press Herald. "Jeopardy doesn't track every married couple that's ever been on, but they've written about a bunch on their website. Whether we're the first, the second, or the first in a long time, I just think it's a really cool accomplishment." "Just the fact of being her husband is the greatest preparation one could ever get," Singer said of his wife. "She's so curious and surrounds herself with such interesting and cosmopolitan things all the time, that by osmosis I almost had to get better." His final answer on the show notably included a hashtag to #BringBackSusan. On Thursday, Gold Derby checked in with Gemini, Google's artificial intelligence program, and it accurately stated that "there have been several married couples" to win the show, and even mentions the "incorrect" reporting regarding Singer and McMillan. A victory for truth! Other married winners include Dan Pawson and Andrea Saenz, Amy Stephenson and Scott Bateman, and David Rigsby and Ryan Alley. Meanwhile, ChatGPT claims that the first married couple to win on Jeopardy is Kristin and Justin Sausville — oops! That's not correct, as their victories were in the 2010s, while Pawson and Saenz triumphed in the 2000s. To date, Jeopardy has created six millionaires: Ken Jennings (who has hosted the show since 2023), Brad Rutter, James Holzhauer, Matt Amodio, Amy Schneider, and Yogesh Raut. See the list of Jeopardy's biggest winners ever. Merv Griffin's iconic American game show originally debuted in 1964. Unlike other programs in the genre, Jeopardy's contestants are presented with general knowledge clues in the form of answers and must respond in the form of questions. The modern-day syndicated version produced by Sony Pictures Television launched in 1984 and continues to air. Best of Gold Derby Cristin Milioti, Amanda Seyfried, Michelle Williams, and the best of our Emmy Limited Series/Movie Actress interviews Paul Giamatti, Stephen Graham, Cooper Koch, and the best of our Emmy Limited Series/Movie Actor interviews Lee Jung-jae, Adam Scott, Noah Wyle, and the best of our Emmy Drama Actor interviews Click here to read the full article.
Yahoo
36 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Kesha's ‘Period': What critics are saying about the singer's first independent album
After releasing three albums to fulfill a recording contract with her accused abuser's label, Kesha has returned with Period, her first independently released album. Critics have responded generally favorably to the latest from the two-time Grammy nominee, which seems to harken back to the messy-pop days of 2010s Kesha. More from Gold Derby Michael Madsen remembered: All his Oscar-nominated films, from 'WarGames' to 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood' The 'Jurassic' rebirth that never happened: How an Oscar-nominated screenwriter almost took the franchise in a wild new direction "It's easy to root for Kesha, which makes listening to (Period.) — her first album as an independent artist, hence its July 4 release date — such a blast," writes Rolling Stone's. "Bookended by pensive moments, (Period.) is a frisky pop record that delights in throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks — while also getting a kick out of any mess that might result from a less-than-successful toss…. Kesha's taste for pop experimentation is in full flower on (Period.)." Similarly, Alexis Petridis of The Guardian found Kesha to be flourishing, surrounded by new collaborators who have allowed her to tap back into the kind of art she made her signature early on in her career. "The songs are all really strong, filled with smart little twists and drops, and funny, self-referential lines: 'You're on TikTok / I'm the f--king OG,'" he writes. "You get the sense of the massed ranks of collaborators – including everyone from regular Father John Misty foil Jonathan Wilson to Madison Love, who counts Blackpink and Addison Rae among her songwriting clients – really getting behind her to make Period a success. Kesha, meanwhile, plays the part of Kesha 1.0 to perfection: for all the lurid lyrical excesses, it never feels as if she's trying too hard. And why would it: she's returning to a role she originated." But while most of the critics writing about Period note its efforts to tap back into prime Kesha, some like Slant's Paul Attard characterize the album as more effortful than successful. "The title of Kesha's sixth studio album — her first to be released independently — suggests that the singer is pressing a symbolic reset button," he writes. "Throughout Period, though, Kesha seems torn between resurrecting the unruly spark of her early work or continuing in a more introspective, experimental direction, a la 2023's Gag Order. The results are, at times, perfectly listenable, but the sheer amount of visible flop sweat pouring from these 11 tracks is nothing short of distracting. Rather than sounding liberated on Period, Kesha feels caught between what the kids now call 'eras,' unsure of which bit to fully commit to." Ironically, Paste's Sam Rosenberg felt that the newly liberated Kesha had put out music that felt more constrained than her previous, more experimental efforts. "Given the media frenzy Kesha had to endure with this lawsuit, one would expect that the project she would make after finally parting ways with RCA and Kemosabe would be more daring, refined, and cathartic than anything she's made before," he writes, "It's a shame, then, that her sixth album isn't really any of those things. ... Despite being touted by Kesha herself as an embodiment of liberation, . (Period) ironically feels like an album you'd expect from an artist being pressured by their label to cater to the masses rather than one made on the artist's own terms." Period releases on July 4. Best of Gold Derby Billboard 200: Chart-topping albums of 2025 Billboard Hot 100: Every No. 1 song of 2025 The B-52s' Kate Pierson talks Rock Hall snub, influencing John Lennon, and fears a solo album would be a 'betrayal' to her band Click here to read the full article.
