We’re just over a month away from 2024 end, and with the New Year on the Horizon, Empire Magazine is jumping ahead with some previews of some of the significant franchise content coming in 2025. The first of them? The new “Jurassic World Rebirth” installment, the latest continuation in the “Jurassic Park” saga, takes place after “Jurassic World Dominion” and introduces an entirely new cast.
So, the magazine has offered the first look at the movie, with a photo centered on the new lead, Scarlett Johansson (“Black Widow”).
Her character, Zora Bennett, is an operative leading a dangerous dinosaur DNA hunt. “She’s looking for meaning in her life after leaving the military,” director Gareth Edwards teased to Empire her role in the film. “And this opportunity comes along where [after it] basically she’d never have to work again. But through that journey, she starts to question the ethical rights and wrongs of what they’re doing.”
It sounds like some of the moral and ethical questions of the last series, as well as the animal/dinosaur rights theme that has run throughout the entire series, will once again be explored.
“It goes back to what I loved about the original,” Edwards told Empire about the new film, “with an embarrassment of riches of different set-piece-type scenarios and tense, fun action moments. There were a lot of opportunities as a filmmaker to have a lot of fun and try and play games with the audience.”
Set five years after the events of ‘Dominion,’ Edwards promises “a whole new chapter in the timeline of Jurassic” and teased some classic ‘J World’ dinos to return (“there are certain dinosaurs it would be a crime against cinema not to include,” he said).
Here’s the official synopsis in case you missed it earlier this year.
Five years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion, the planet’s ecology has proven largely inhospitable to dinosaurs. Those remaining exist in isolated equatorial environments with climates resembling the one in which they once thrived. The three most colossal creatures within that tropical biosphere hold the key to a drug that will bring miraculous life-saving benefits to humankind.
Johansson plays skilled covert operations expert Zora Bennett, contracted to lead a skilled team on a top-secret mission to secure genetic material from the world’s three most massive dinosaurs. When Zora’s operation intersects with a civilian family whose boating expedition was capsized by marauding aquatic dinos, they all find themselves stranded on an island where they come face-to-face with a sinister, shocking discovery that’s been hidden from the world for decades.
“Jurassic World: Rebirth” also stars Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, David Iacono, Audrina Miranda, Philippine Velge, Bechir Sylvain and Ed Skrein.
The script was written by David Koepp, the original writer of “Jurassic Park” and ‘Rebirth’ opens in theaters on July 2, 2025.
