Jurassic World Rebirth is taking the franchise back to basics with an island setting and plenty of fan-favourite dinosaurs. Among them are the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the Dilophosaurus, and the long-awaited return of Jurassic Park III's Spinosaurus.
However, filmmaker Gareth Edwards is leaning into the franchise's horror roots with mutant dinosaurs created on a third island by InGen's most twisted scientists.
Among them will be the Distortus Rex, or "D-Rex." Talking to Empire Online, Edwards teased, "It’s kind of like if the T-Rex was designed by H.R. Giger, and then that whole thing had sex with a Rancor."
"It’s a design that I was really happy with," the director said of the six-limbed creature. "I'd like to buy the toy of it when it comes out."
ILM's David Vickery added, "Gareth wanted us to feel sorry for it as well as terrified, because its deformities have caused it some pain, and there’s an encumbrance to it."
According to writer David Koepp, we'll also meet the winged Mutadons, "a combination of a pterosaur and a Raptor. Those came from my strange mind. We saw in some of the previous Jurassic World movies that their experiments made dinosaurs bigger, meaner, scarier, and it occurred to me and Steven [Spielberg] that those can’t all have gone well."
Seeing these hybrid dinosaurs in action has made Jurassic World Rebirth particularly intriguing. Combine that with the fact that this feels like a classic Jurassic adventure, and Superman and The Fantastic Four: First Steps will have a hard time topping the movie in July.
Here's the official synopsis for Jurassic World Rebirth:
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 across land, sea and air within that tropical biosphere hold, in their DNA, the key to a drug that will bring miraculous life-saving benefits to humankind.
Academy Award nominee Scarlett Johansson plays skilled covert operations expert Zora Bennett, contracted to lead a skilled team on a top-secret mission to secure the genetic material.
When Zora’s operation intersects with a civilian family whose boating expedition was capsized by marauding aquatic dinos, they all find themselves stranded on a forbidden island that had once housed an undisclosed research facility for Jurassic Park. There, in a terrain populated by dinosaurs of vastly different species, they come face-to-face with a sinister, shocking discovery that has been hidden from the world for decades.
The movie also stars Jonathan Bailey, Mahershala Ali, Rupert Friend, and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo. The supporting cast includes Luna Blaise, David Iacono, Audrina Miranda, Philippine Velge, Bechir Sylvain, and Ed Skrein. Gareth Edwards directs from a script by David Koepp.
Jurassic World Rebirth arrives in theaters on July 2.