Colin Trevorrow on the inspiration behind Jurassic World’s Indominus Rex

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

It's almost time to head back to the park and this time…we're in for something bigger and meaner than we've ever seen before. The Indominus Rex, which has been glimpsed in bits and pieces in most of the trailers for JURASSIC WORLD, takes over as the franchise's new monster and director Colin Trevorrow spoke with Entertainment Weekly about the inspirations behind this new dinosaur.

The Indominus was meant to embody our worst tendencies. We’re surrounded by wonder and yet we want more. And we want it bigger, faster, louder, better. And in the world of the movie the animal is designed based on a series of corporate focus groups. Like in the same way a lot of movies are. They sit a bunch of people down and they ask them, “What can we do to make the dinosaurs more entertaining for you? What would make you tell a friend to come to Jurassic World?” And their answer is, of course, “We want to see something bigger, faster, louder, more vicious; we want a killer.” And they get what what they ask for.

With the "bigger, faster, louder, more viscous" tagline, it's easy to see the Indominus Rex as a metaphor for modern movie franchises; which is something Trevorrow himself realized early on:

We’re so surrounded by so much of this marketing and just being told on a regular basis that you have to like this, you will go here, you want this. I found that to me that fit perfectly into what a theme park of dinosaur would be about. It’s a surprisingly simple idea. I found that a lot of bigger films tend to get very complicated in their storytelling these days, and we have ideas in here that, yes, they may be sophisticated if you decide to think about them and talk about them a lot, but I think the experience of seeing the film is one that even young kids will be able to process and get behind. We live in a cult of the upgrade right now. There’s always something around the corner that will make whatever you think is cool right now feel obsolete. And I feel like the Indominus Rex is the animal version of that.

When asked about which real dinosaurs the Indominus Rex was actually made of, Trevorrow said that "it’s a hybrid of specific dinosaurs with great movie names like the Giganotosaurus and Majungasaurus, as well as other animals that exist in the world today, with certain attributes that Dr. Wu [B.D. Wong] felt would create the ultimate piece of entertainment." Trevorrow later went on to compare the Indominus Rex to other classic villains such as Darth Vader and Frankenstein:

It’s a classic villain to me because it’s comparatively synthetic to the other dinosaurs. You know, Frankenstein and Darth Vader and even Captain Hook, there are parts to them that aren’t entirely organic. Indominus sort of makes the dinosaurs feel like real animals. It’s an abomination that must be exterminated.

JURASSIC WORLD will finally be unleashed on June 12, 2015.