One of Universal Pictures’ most successful franchises is the “Jurassic Park/World” films, so it isn’t surprising to hear that another film is reportedly in the works. The Hollywood Reporter has revealed that “Jurassic World 4,” aka, “Jurassic 7” is now in development at the studio with “Jurassic Park” and “Jurassic Park: The Lost World” screenwriter David Koepp (“Mission: Impossible”) behind the new script. Koepp has a longtime relationship with Amblin/Steven Spielberg after tackling those first two installments alongside legacy sequels “Indiana Jones & The Kingdom of Crystal Skull” and “Indiana Jones & The Dial of Destiny.”

However, the kicker is that Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, and other cast members aren’t expected to reprise their roles. This tidbit about the cast not returning could be a suggestion that a second soft reboot might pivot to a new wave of lead characters and perhaps attempt a different angle with the dinosaur adventure flick. Things are seemingly in a really good place with Koepp’s script because Universal is said to be considering a “possible release date in 2025”, but without a director or the studio not making an official announcement we’ll just have to wait for more details.

The sixth film “Jurassic World: Dominion” hit theaters back in 2019 and was still able to make a solid amount of money for Universal with a global cume of over a billion dollars. While the new trilogy made the studio an impressive $4 billion. Not hard to see the reasoning why they’d imagine audiences would still want to see more films, but just a different group of actors starring in them.

As a fan of the franchise going back to 1993, I’ve sort of lost interest in a lot of these stories as the movies have sort of all blended together until the dinosaurs had one of the islands destroyed in “Jurassic Park: The Fallen Kingdom.” The original idea for the never-made version of “Jurassic Park” featured dinosaurs being mutated into giant humanoid creatures as highlighted in concept artwork (That artwork that made it online was from Hollywood concept artist Carlos Huante and you can see it below) and there also had been ideas of adding the dinos into a military weapons program (Seeds were planted in “Jurassic World”) that may have mirrored “Dino-Riders.”

Another way to go could be taking a page from “Kingdom of The Planet of Apes” and “Mad Max: Fury Road” by pushing forward into a post-apocalyptic setting in the future where the human population has dwindled as the dinosaurs have thrived as they have reclaimed the planet.

The 80’s comic book “Xenozoic Tales,” later retitled “Cadillacs & Dinosaurs,” created by Mark Schultz is sort of neat template for this concept as prehistoric animals overrun a futuristic version of the planet (set in the 26th Century) that had runs at Marvel Comics and Dark Horse Comics. While the IP hasn’t kept in the zeitgeist decades later it did spawn an animated series that aired on CBS, a popular arcade game from “Street Fighter” publisher Capcom, and a line of action figures. Universal likely wouldn’t have to spend too much if they wanted to flat-out acquire this for its budding new trilogy or change just enough to apply the concept given that the cloned dinosaurs living in the wild is the angle of “Jurassic World: Dominion.”

SOURCE: THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER