Jurassic World: 10 Reasons Why It’s Such A Huge Success

7. A New Start

The shortcomings of the first two Jurassic Park sequels could easily justify a separate article of some length. However, one issue the films shared was the over-reliance on familiar characters that hampered efforts to create original stories. That Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neill were brought back as the leads in The Lost World and Jurassic Park III respectively, not to mention several other key cast members also making fleeting appearances, was perfectly understandable. After all, Spielberg himself and threequel director Joe Johnston were clearly intent on honouring Jurassic Park and its fans by bringing back Ian Malcolm and Alan Grant to spearhead new instalments. However, shoehorning in characters with firsthand experience of malicious dinosaurs required flights of plot fancy that were difficult to swallow. No such issues for Jurassic World as screenwriter Derek Connolly and director Colin Trevorrow opted for a clean slate that all but ignored the two previous sequels. BD Wong returned as Dr. Henry Wu and served an organic plot function following his original work extracting dino-DNA in Jurassic Park, but otherwise a new cast of characters was decided upon to give the franchise a facelift and fresh impetus.