But is it really? Putting aside the quality of the film itself (which, judging from the shellacking it’s getting from critics, is quite lacking), if Jurassic World Dominion performs up to the billion-dollar standards of its recent predecessors at the box office, or even comes close enough, it’s hard to imagine Universal Pictures wanting to turn off what has been a reliably powerful spigot of cash for nearly 30 years. We won’t go into the entire plot of the movie here, but by the end of this film, dinosaurs are still out and about in the world after their travels have taken them from Isla Nublar to northern California to the mountains of Italy. Their fate remains unclear as the film comes to a close, but the implication is they are here to stay and that humans must find a way to co-exist with them (which is pretty much where 2015’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom left us too, but that’s another article). “The equilibrium on the planet is left in a different place than it certainly was at the beginning of Jurassic Park, or even at the beginning of Jurassic World,” Trevorrow tells Den of Geek. “I feel like part of my job was to tend this garden for a period of time and leave it in great shape… so I wanted to leave all the possibilities on the table.” But Trevorrow adds that he almost certainly won’t be the one to tell the next story. “I feel like I made a trilogy of movies, and it’s a lot,” he says. “It’s been nine years of my life. And I feel like the audience would probably agree that they’ve seen what I have to say about this. I think there would be a lot of interest in what another filmmaker had to say about it.” In addition to a new director, we can probably anticipate seeing a whole new cast of (preferably better developed) characters as well. At least one member of the current cast, Bryce Dallas Howard, agrees with Trevorrow that it’s time to “pass the baton” after playing park-supervisor-turned-animal-rights-activist Claire Dearing in the three latest films. “This is definitely the end of the road for our characters in terms of their journey,” Howard says. “Whether or not something happens in 30 years, like the case with the legacy characters [in Dominion], that remains to be seen. But it’s just been an incredible run, and the fact that the grand finale of Jurassic World is also the grand finale of Jurassic Park makes it a spectacle not to be missed.” Of course, while this is billed as the grand finale of the two trilogies produced to date, no one is specifically saying that this is the end of the franchise itself—all you have to do is start another trilogy. And if one wants to really drill down into this, the marketing is calling this the end of the “Jurassic era.” So…Triassic Park, anyone? Fancy a climb up Mesozoic Mountain? There’s already a kids’ animated spinoff series called Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, so why not go all the way and welcome us to the Cretaceous Cosmos? Jurassic World Dominion is out in theaters now.
