JURASSIC WORLD Will Ignore The Previous Two JURASSIC PARK Sequels

I haven't heard from anyone who has seen the film yet, but from the comments I've seen, Jurassic World has received a mixed response from movie fans so far. The nostalgia of trying to recreate Steven Spielberg's original has some people excited, but one of the biggest criticisms I've seen has been the idea of "why didn't they learn from the mistakes of the previous movies?" Well, now at least part of that question has been answered.

In an interview with Yahoo, director Colin Trevorrow said that Jurassic World is a direct sequel to Jurassic Park, skipping over the two previous sequels:

Of course, Jurassic World isn’t a mere re-creation of Jurassic Park; it’s a direct sequel to the original, set some 20 years after the events of Spielberg’s film. (According to Trevorrow, the previous sequels aren’t being written out of continuity so much as placed to the side, as they both unfolded on a different island.) In that time, a functioning theme park has been constructed on Isla Nubar, overseen by operations manager Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) and employing hundreds of staffers, including velociraptor trainer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt).

OK, so let's say the events of the previous two sequels are "placed to the side." Even though a majority of the action admittedly took place on a different island, The Lost World still brought a freaking T-rex to San Diego. Is no one going to mention that in this movie? Are all of these characters — many of whom are working to build a dinosaur-inhabited theme park — going to be blissfully unaware of that time that the world's most dangerous killing machine made landfall in the contiguous United States and stomped his way through a major metropolitan area? That seems inexcusable, doesn't it? I hope that's not the case. Trevorrow seems like a smart guy, so maybe his quote was taken out of context.

And speaking of Trevorrow, there's a good piece over at /Film about how he got the job, and while the whole thing is worth reading, it basically boils down to Brad Bird not being able to direct Star Wars: Episode VII because he was busy with Tomorrowland. There was a brief time in which Kathleen Kennedy considered bringing Trevorrow on to prep Star Wars as a sort of stand-in director while Bird finished Tomorrowland (with the intention of Bird being able to make the two films back to back), but when that didn't work out, producer Frank Marshall introduced Trevorrow to Spielberg and he ended up making that movie instead. Pretty cool stuff.

Jurassic World arrives in theaters on June 12th.