Jurassic World Rebirth unveils new images while the producer and director reveal more story and action details

There’s a new entry in the Jurassic Park / Jurassic World franchise heading our way, with Jurassic World Rebirth set to reach theatres on July 2, 2025 – and with the first teaser trailer expected to drop online tomorrow (February 5th), Vanity Fair has unveiled a batch of new images, while also sharing some new story and character details! The images can be seen at the bottom of this article.

News of the new Jurassic World movie first hit back in January of 2024, when it was revealed that the screenplay had already been written by original Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp, returning to the franchise for the first time since The Lost World: Jurassic Park. The project was assembled in a mad scramble after that, with Godzilla and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story director Gareth Edwards ending up at the helm. This new Jurassic World movie won’t be featuring any returning lead characters from the previous Jurassic Park / Jurassic World movies, so describing it as a “Rebirth” could be accurate. The characters played by Sam Neill, Jeff Goldblum, and Laura Dern are out, as are the ones played by Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard.

The new characters are played by the likes of Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow), Jonathan Bailey (Bridgerton), Mahershala Ali (Green Book), Rupert Friend (Obi-Wan Kenobi), and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (The Lincoln Lawyer) – all of whom had their roles directly offered to them. Luna Blaise (Manifest), on the other hand, had to (according to Deadline) “beat out a number of actors” to land her role. David Iacono of The Summer I Turned Pretty, child actress Audrina Miranda, Philippine Velge (Station Eleven), Ed Skrein (Deadpool), and Béchir Sylvain (Diarra from Detroit) are also in the cast… along with a bunch of hungry dinosaurs.

Glen Powell (Top Gun: Maverick) was also offered a role, but he turned it down because he felt his presence in the movie wouldn’t help it. He did say that the script is great, though.

Frank Marshall and Patrick Crowley are producing the film for Kennedy/Marshall. Steven Spielberg is executive producing through Amblin Entertainment. Universal’s executive vp of production development Sara Scott and creative executive Jacqueline Garell are overseeing the project for the studio. 

Here’s what we’ve previously heard about the plot: Jurassic World Rebirth sees an intrepid team racing to secure DNA samples from the three most colossal creatures across land, sea and air. 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’s character is Zora Bennett, “a skilled covert operations expert contracted to lead a 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.” Bailey is playing paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis, with Ali as Zora’s most trusted team leader, Duncan Kincaid. 

Speaking with Vanity Fair, Marshall said the goal with this new movie was to make the dinosaurs feel dangerous again. “You’re in a new place, you don’t know what’s around the corner. You’ve got a different jungle, you’ve got more water, you’ve got higher cliffs. There’s a little bit of everything that’s scary.” He added that some of the dinosaurs that exist in this setting, an island near the equator that was once home to first Jurassic Park’s research lab, are “the dinosaurs that didn’t work. There’s some mutations in there. They’re all based on real dinosaur research, but they look a little different.“

For the design of a mutant dinosaur we’ll be seeing in the trailer, Edwards drew inspiration from Alien, Return of the Jedi, and, of course, the original Jurassic Park. He said, “Some Rancor went in there, some H.R. Giger went in there, a little T. rex went in there…” He went on to say that he feels “Jurassic Park is a horror film in the witness protection program. Most people don’t think of it like that. We all went to see it as kids. But I was scared shitless, to be honest, when I was at the cinema watching the T. rex attack. It’s one of the most well-directed scenes in cinema history, so the bar’s really high to come on board and try and do this.“

Koepp has previously teased that a sequence from Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park that didn’t fit into the original movie has made its way into Jurassic World Rebirth, and Marshall confirmed that it is, as fans have speculated, a sequence in which characters “attempt to drift through a lagoon in a rubber raft without waking a slumbering Tyrannosaurus rex. They don’t succeed, and end up paddling for their lives.” Koepp is also the one who came up with the story idea that “dinosaurs (are) passé now. People were tired of them. They were an inconvenience. People weren’t going to museums to see them or to petting zoos. They were just in the way. And the climate was not conducive to their survival, so they were starting to pass away and get sick. But there was one area around the equator that had the perfect climate and temperature and environment for them. … A company that [Rupert Friend’s character] represents discovers a way to cure heart disease, but you need the DNA from the three largest dinosaurs on land, sea, and air. Those three dinosaurs exist on this island where they were first created, but it’s a no-go zone.“

While bringing the concept to the screen, Edwards made sure to keep the works of Spielberg in mind. “To me, it’s like a heist movie that meets all the films of Steven Spielberg I loved growing up. The three films we were orbiting were Jaws, Indiana Jones, and the awe and wonder of the original Jurassic.” The Indiana Jones inspiration really comes through in a sequel where Bailey’s Dr. Loomis is trying to extract fluid from the eggs of flying dinosaurs. In the script, this sequence was set in a cave on a cliff. Edwards changed the setting: “The original script just referenced the nest in a cliff and I really felt like we’re in Central America, and I like the idea that there was an old civilization here at one point. (The setting became) an Inca-style old temple that had been abandoned hundreds of thousands of years ago. Inevitably, the second you do that, you’re suddenly going, ‘This is very Indiana Jones.’”

For more quotes and character information, click over to the Vanity Fair link.

Does Jurassic World Rebirth sound interesting to you? Take a look at the new images, then let us know by leaving a comment below.