Close to fifteen years following the release of the third film, the JURASSIC PARK franchise was resurrected in a big way with JURASSIC WORLD, which would go on to gross an astounding $1.67 billion and set up a new series of films, the next of which is set to arrive next year. JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM will find Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) returning to Isla Nublar, where the dinosaurs have completely overrun the park, to save the animals when a volcano threatens them with a second extinction. Beyond a lot of running and screaming, we're not yet sure where the JURASSIC WORLD sequel will take us, but during a YouTube interview posted by Sebas Tabany (via /Film), Colin Trevorrow confirmed that FALLEN KINGDOM will be the second film of a trilogy.
I knew where I wanted it to go. I remember telling Steven [Spielberg] even while we were making the first movie, “This is the beginning. Here is the middle. And here’s the end of the end.' This is where we want to go. I feel like that kind of design is crucial to a franchise like this if you really want to bring people along with you and make sure they stay interested. It needs to be thought through on that level. It can’t be arbitrary, especially if we want to turn this into a character-based franchise with people who you lean in to follow what they’re going to do.
Although JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM won't end on a cliffhanger, Colin Trevorrow teases that we'll certainly be left wanting more. "At the end of this movie, it’s not a cliffhanger, but it’s designed for people to want to know what’s going to happen next, whereas the earlier Jurassic Park movies had pretty clear definitive endings," Trevorrow said. "They were much more episodic. In working with Derek Connolly, my co-writer, we were also thinking about where it was gonna go in the future." There has long been rumours that the franchise would be moving towards genetically enhanced dinosaurs ridden or controlled by soliders, but Colin Trevorrow doesn't seem to think that that's a possibility.
It’s important that we keep it at least grounded in a space where the dinosaurs are a parable for animals in the world today. I think that ultimately, when people are able to watch this film and where this franchise is going, it really is about the ethical treatment of animals in the world and our responsibility to the living creatures that we share the planet with, alongside our responsibilities to the planet itself. I think the riding of a t-rex by a soldier is a level of fantasy, [while] I love it and I would love to see it, I don’t know if it’s specifically this franchise, but it’s super cool.
The official synopsis for JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM:
It’s been four years since theme park and luxury resort Jurassic World was destroyed by dinosaurs out of containment. Isla Nublar now sits abandoned by humans while the surviving dinosaurs fend for themselves in the jungles. When the island’s dormant volcano begins roaring to life, Owen (Chris Pratt) and Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) mount a campaign to rescue the remaining dinosaurs from this extinction-level event. Owen is driven to find Blue, his lead raptor who’s still missing in the wild, and Claire has grown a respect for these creatures she now makes her mission. Arriving on the unstable island as lava begins raining down, their expedition uncovers a conspiracy that could return our entire planet to a perilous order not seen since prehistoric times.
JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM is set for a June 22, 2018 release.