J. A. Bayona is having a great year. His sumptuous fantasy adventure A MONSTER CALLS is gearing up to be a spectacular del Toro-esque achievement, he's on board for the WORLD WAR Z sequel, and now he's been officially announced as the director for nothing less than the sequel to the 2015 runaway smash hit JURASSIC WORLD.
This is the latest in a trend of studios hiring relatively small directors for their massive tentpole pictures. This has worked well in the past with flicks like James Gunn's GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY or Gareth Edwards' GODZILLA. Of course, this method also led to Josh Trank's FANTASTIC FOUR, but you win some, you lose some.
Plus, it's not like Bayona is an untested filmmaker. His horror hit THE ORPHANAGE may not have been an AVENGERS-level moneymaker, but it proves that he can lead a damn film. The only question I have is why the hell it took so long for studios to notice him in the first place.
According to JURASSIC WORLD director Colin Trevorrow, who is writing the sequel's script:
[It will not be] just a bunch of dinosaurs chasing people on an island…That’ll get old real fast.
I feel like the idea that this isn’t always going to be limited to theme parks, and there are applications for this science that reach far beyond entertainment. And when you look back at nuclear power and how that started, the first instinct was to weaponise it and later on we found it could be used for energy.
And this isn’t something necessarily that was in the book but is a seed that I wanted to plant in this movie, is that might be able to grow in more of these movies if they decide to make more of them, is: What if this went open source? It's almost like InGen is Mac, but what if PC gets their hands on it? What if there are 15 different entities around the world who can make a dinosaur?
I'm sensing a JURASSIC WORLD 3: DINO WARS, but for the time being, JURASSIC WORLD 2 will open on June 22nd, 2017 with Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard returning.