Jurassic World 3: Dominion will reunite the original Jurassic Park trio – Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum as they join forces with Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard. And if that's not enough to get you excited, the cast and crew have been promising one of the most exciting films yet in the franchise.
Jurassic World 3: Dominion will be crashing onto our screens very soon as we find out how the latest trilogy comes to an end. There have been some huge updates recently, including some a new trailer and some exciting insight from the cast and crew. We also know the bumper runtime for the new movie as well as having a handy dinosaur tracker to show where has been hit worst following the events of the previous film.
So read on for our complete guide to the upcoming movie, from plot to cast and even some exclusive insight. We've added in all of the latest updates as we edge closer to its June release. It's going to be ROAR-some! (Sorry)
Jurassic World 3: Dominion release date
With coronavirus holding back big screen debuts everywhere, the Jurassic World 3: Dominion release date has been similarly affected. The movie’s now set for June 10, 2022, a year after its original release of June 11, 2021. Not long to wait now!
Jurassic World 3: Dominion runtime
Jurassic World Dominion is the longest movie in the franchise, clocking in at a huge 2 hours and 23 minutes.
Previously, The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom were tied for being the longest Jurassic movies, both coming in at 2 hours 9 mins. Then came the original Jurassic Park at 2 hours 7 mins, followed by the first Jurassic World at 2 hours 4 minutes. In last place remains Jurassic Park 3, which comes in at a smooth 1 hour 32 minutes. Expect big things from Dominion, then.
Jurassic World 3: Dominion trailer
The first trailer for Jurassic World Dominion saw the original trio – that's Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, and Sam Neill – are reunited once more, and Bryce Dallas Howard's Clare is seen in some serious trouble with a dino pursuing her into a body of water. A lot of dinosaurs are also running wild, which, as you might imagine, is causing a lot of problems. Since its release, there's also been another trailer which gives some more insight into the plot as raptor Blue's baby is taken. The clip shows the team battling as dinosaurs rule the earth, with Dern's Ellie Sattler warning: "If our world's gonna survive, what matters is what we do now."
Before the trailers arrived, a dinosaur-packed 10-minute short was released that helps bridge the gap between Fallen Kingdom and the new movie.
"Battle at Big Rock" is set in northern California, a year after the dinosaurs were set loose at the Lockwood mansion. It shows a vacationing family getting caught in the middle of a scrap between a carnivorous Allosaurus and a family of plant-eating Nasutoceratops, hiding from the carnage in their RV.
Just as interesting as the central plot, however, are the hints at how the world has changed. News reports mention sightings of baby dinosaurs – suggesting they’re breeding in the wild – while there’s talk of adapting to a “new normal”. (The short was released months before “new normal” became part of everyday conversation.)
There’s also a few tantalizing mid-credits scenes: a pack of tiny Compsognathus chasing a little girl; a close encounter with a Stegosaurus causing a car accident; a Parasaurolophus drinking by the side of a river; a spectacular shot of a shark leaping out of the water to eat a seal being topped by a Mosasaur eating the shark; and a Pteranodon swooping out of the sky to catch a dove released at a wedding. The world of Jurassic World 3: Dominion is clearly going to be very different to what we’ve seen before.
Jurassic World 3: Dominion IMAX preview
Ahead of Jurassic World 3: Dominion's release, some preview footage played in front of Fast and Furious 9 at the IMAX. The new scene, which is the film's prologue, reveals "what Earth looked like long before humans existed and tell the origin story of how dinosaur DNA first came to be carried by a mythic mosquito," according to Universal, the studio behind the movie. The clip has since been released online, and you can watch above.
As this is an origins story, the dinosaurs have feathers. The new movie includes up-to-date scientific evidence unearthed since the first movie, to hopefully appease fans upset at the inaccuracy of dinosaurs without feathers. Seeing as how Jurassic World Dominion will kick off before humans entered the picture, it makes sense – narratively speaking – that these creatures are the real deal.
"Ever since I was a kid, I have wanted to see dinosaurs in their natural habitat," Trevorrow said in a statement about the extended preview. "It may have taken a few decades, but with a little help from ILM, Universal and Amblin, it has finally happened. This Preview is just a glimpse of the film we’ve made. It's an epic celebration of everything Steven Spielberg and Michael Crichton created, and I can’t wait to share it with the world next summer."
Jurassic World 3: Dominion cast
Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are back as Owen Grady and Claire Dearing for more dino-action, but, this time, they're joined by the returning main trio: Laura Dern as Ellie Sattler, Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm, and Sam Neill as Alan Grant.
At a roundtable at which GamesRadar+ was present, Colin Trevorrow said: "I think people may be underestimating the size and importance of Laura Dern and Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum’s characters in this movie; it is very much an ensemble."
He was even clearer in conversation with Total Film. "Laura, Sam, and Jeff have as much screentime in the film as Bryce and Chris do," he explained. "They’re not together the entire time, but we are following both of their stories equally, and you have a sense that they’re going to collide at a certain point... there’s this tension. It’s not structured necessarily in a way that we’re used to seeing our Hollywood movies structured. But it works."
Trevorrow also told Collider that the movie won't strictly follow "traditional screenplay structure" with one main character "where everybody knows what happens on page twelve."
Instead, the film focuses on "two sets of characters" – Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt, and Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum – and is "telling two parallel stories that are just driving closer and closer together, and you understand that, and you start to understand how they're going to intersect, and then they do. But that's not a traditional way to structure a movie."
Elsewhere, Isabella Sermon is returning as Maisie Lockwood, the young girl rescued during Fallen Kingdom – and revealed to be a clone. It’s also no surprise that we’ll be seeing more of Dr Henry Wu, the original Jurassic Park geneticist who’s become a major player in the new trilogy.
A couple of Claire’s Dinosaur Protection Group colleagues reprise their Fallen Kingdom roles in the new movie – Daniella Pineda as paleo-veterinarian Zia Rodriguez and Justice Smith as computer expert Franklin Webb.
Grady's fellow Velociraptor tamer Barry Sembene, played by Omar Sy, is also back –but Jake Johnson, who plays theme park control room operator Lowery Cruthers, will not be returning.
DeWanda Wise will play Kayla, who is seen accompanying Owen and Claire in the trailer. Other franchise newcomers Mamoudou Athie Dichen Lachman, and Scott Haze will take on as-yet-undisclosed roles, but the most intriguing new arrival is Campbell Scott. According to Entertainment Weekly, the Singles/Roger Dodger star will play Lewis Dodgson, whose name may be familiar to fans of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park novel and the original movie. Dodgson (played by Cameron Thor in Jurassic Park) was the rival businessman who paid rogue IT guy Dennis Nedry to steal embryos in a can of shaving foam. "He is the main villain throughout both of [Crichton's] novels, and I think what Campbell's done with the character is just amazing," Trevorrow told Entertainment Weekly. "I can't wait for people to see it."
The trio could also be joined by another veteran of the original movie. Joe Mazzello played dino-obsessed kid Tim Murphy in Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and got fans speculating in February when he tweeted: “I think it’s time to get back to work. What do you say gang?” The timing checks out with other announcements about the movie, but we’re still waiting on official confirmation. It’ll be interesting to see if Tim got to live out his dream of becoming a palaeontologist.
Jurassic World 3: Dominion plot
The trailer teases a world where dinosaurs walk among human-kind, which, naturally, is causing some trouble. While Owen and Claire try to deal with the carnage, the original trio of Ian Malcolm, Alan Grant, and Ellie Sattler reunite and face the dinos once more.
"The movie will ask the question, 'If dinosaurs lived amongst us, would you be safe?'" director Colin Trevorrow said at CinemaCon. "And the answer is no."
What we won’t be seeing, however, is dinosaurs doing a Godzilla and trashing big cities. “I just have no idea what would motivate dinosaurs to terrorise a city,” Trevorrow told BirthMoviesDeath. “They can’t organise. Right now we’ve got lethal predators in wild areas surrounding cities all over the world. They don’t go pack hunting for humans in urban areas. The world I get excited about is the one where it’s possible that a dinosaur might run out in front of your car on a foggy backroad, or invade your campground looking for food. A world where dinosaur interaction is unlikely but possible – the same way we watch out for bears or sharks.
“We hunt animals, we traffic them, we herd them, we breed them, we invade their territory and pay the price, but we don’t go to war with them. If that was the case, we’d have lost that war a long time ago.”
Chris Pratt confirmed a time jump in an interview with MTV News: “How are, not only these dinosaurs, but this technology moving forward going to affect the planet? We jump forwards and it’s like, ‘Oh right, oh damn…’”
That time jump will presumably have given the dinos time to get a foothold in the USA, as hinted in "Battle at Big Rock." Trevorrow explained more about the timeline to Screen Rant: "Everything in my mind has always been pretty much present-day. So Big Rock took place a year or so after Fallen Kingdom in 2019, when it came out, and the T-Rex has just been out in the Sierra Nevada forest where they all escaped to. It's absolutely massive; it's a whole section of the state. And so she's just been living in there; they've been struggling to catch her for a very long time. So this is about four years later - it’s when the movie comes out, so 2022."
It's also likely that, in the time skip, Owen and Claire will have formed a surrogate family with young Maisie Lockwood, revealed to be a clone of Jurassic Park co-founder Sir Benjamin Lockwood’s late daughter. Lockwood’s decision to replicate an actual human will surely have huge ramifications for the Jurassic World 3: Dominion plot.
Indeed, Trevorrow told Entertainment Weekly that the new movie will be a "science thriller". "If I could contextualize each film," he said, "I would say Jurassic World was an action-adventure, Fallen Kingdom is kind of a horror suspense film, and Jurassic World 3 will be a science thriller in the same way that Jurassic Park was."
We’re guessing that Lewis Dodgson’s BioSyn outfit will be involved in that side of the story somehow – whether he’s taking an interest in cloning dinosaurs or people. Perhaps we’ll also get an answer to the question of whether Eli Mills (the businessman who betrayed Lockwood in Fallen Kingdom) was getting outside help.
Crucially, it seems that the Jurassic World 3: Dominion plot is going to tie up the six-film arc that Steven Spielberg started in 1993. "In terms of the third movie, the goal overall is to bring the entire saga together," Bryce Dallas Howard told Cinemablend. "It’ll be the sixth film at the end of the day." Though it won’t necessarily be the end of the Jurassic Park/world universe…
When Collider asked the franchise’s long-time producer Frank Marshall if Jurassic World 3: Dominion would be the end of the series, he answered with a decisive “no”.
“It’s the start of a new era,” Marshall continued. “The dinosaurs are now on the mainland amongst us, and they will be for quite some time, I hope.”
Jurassic World 3: Dominion dinosaurs – what do we know about the movie’s non-human stars?
Yes, the human cast members are important, but everybody knows the real stars of the franchise are toothier, scalier and generally scarier. It seems that the roster of Jurassic World 3: Dominion will be expanding on what we’ve seen before.
Trevorrow announced on Twitter that Edinburgh University palaeontologist Steve Brusatte has been brought on to the consulting for the film, and he also revealed to Screen Rant that there are "no hybrids in this movie," which means all the dinos involved have walked the Earth at some point. "I really wanted to focus on dinosaurs that really existed. That’s what made me fall in love with this franchise in the first place... Real dinosaurs are awesome; they don’t need to be hybrids to be awesome," he added.
He also said that we can expect to see the Giganotosaurus again, after it showed up in the IMAX preview: "The Giganotosaurus – as you can imagine, I wouldn't do the audience like that by just showing the Giganotosaurus taking out the T-Rex and never seeing it again. So that's going to be a major player going forward. It's a pretty badass dinosaur, that thing."
A lot of the dinos will be created with animatronics rather than CG – more so than on the previous Jurassic movies. "We’ve actually gone more practical with every Jurassic movie we’ve made since the first one, and we’ve made more animatronics in this one than we have in the previous two," Trevorrow said on Collider’s Comic-Con@Home panel. "We finally reached a point where it’s possible to… digital extensions on animatronics will be able to match the texture and the level of fidelity that, on film, an animatronic is going to be able to bring. And you didn’t use to be able to really mix them. You could really see the seams. And so that part of it is very exciting for me.
"[Fallen Kingdom director] J.A. Bayona really, he found the value in creating really photo-real, just beautiful lighting references that could be articulated just slightly. Just a head and a jaw that could move, but painted beautifully, hand-painted. And we do it for all of the dinosaurs now, so when we put it into a space, you can see how the light reacts to the skin. And even if they ultimately do make that a digital animal, there was always something there reacting to the light in that environment."
The Jurassic World Twitter account gave us an up close and personal look at some practical dinos – and they look scarily realistic.
Jurassic World glam squad 💄 pic.twitter.com/8Rt0epygjrJune 28, 2021
And that's a wrap on what we know about Jurassic World Dominion. While we wait for the new movie to reach cinemas, make sure to check out our ranking of the best sci-fi movies of all time. Or perhaps get to know the Jurassic World animated series on Netflix. It contains some good teasers for Dominion...
