It probably goes without saying at this point, but considering just how many blockbusters we have coming out in July 2025 alone, we're going to say it anyway: Jurassic World Rebirth is one of the most anticipated movies of the year.
The seventh film in the Jurassic Park / World franchise, it seeks to reboot the billion-dollar phenomenon just three years after its previous installment, Jurassic World Dominion, wrapped up the arc 30 years (plus 65 million more) in the making. To do that, Universal has enlisted Godzilla director Gareth Edwards, Jurassic Park scribe David Koepp, and a star-studded cast featuring Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, Mahershala Ali, Dead Boy Detectives star David Iacono and more.
The film arrives this summer, where it will be joined in the month of July by James Gunn's Superman movie and Marvel Studios' The Fantastic Four: First Steps. While there will be no doubt many reasons to ensure that fans flock to see the dinos once again, Rebirth promises to take the franchise back to basics - by doing something that not even the first film did.
Jurassic World Rebirth is incorporating a scene from the original Jurassic Park novel that the movie didn't use
One thing that Jurassic World Rebirth needs to do is come up with a way to make a 30-year old franchise feel fresh. It shouldn't be as hard as it sounds considering the film series spent almost half of that time in hibernation due to production hell preventing the fourth one from happening for 14 years, but after the Jurassic World part of that franchise was criticized for becoming the lesson it was trying to teach us, it's imperative that this "rebirth" is just that: A new beginning.
It turns out that the creative team have the same idea, as one of the many ways that it plans on reenergizing the film series is by revisiting the fear that confrontations with dinosaurs bring out. Part of that thinking will see the upcoming movie adapt a scene from Michael Crichton's original Jurassic Park novel that never made it into the game-changing movie adaptation in 1993.
Producer Gary Marshall revealed to Vanity Fair that Jurassic World Rebirth will adapt the scene in which Dr. Alan Grant and the two children he's protecting attempt to "drift through a lagoon in a rubber raft" without waking a Tyrannosaurus Rex sleeping nearby. They aren't successful and the T-Rex begins to chase them through the water.
It's unclear how the new film will adapt the scene and which of the newer characters will be involved, but it will undoubtedly be thrilling to see it finally come to life after all these years. The river raft scene is undoubtedly one of the most suspenseful parts of Crichton's novel, so fans have often debated about what it could have looked like if it had been adapted in the original movie.
The scene was storyboarded for the 1993 film but it didn't make it into the final script and wasn't shot. Koepp, who wrote the script, reportedly said that it was cut due to the fact that it took the characters off the island in a way and deviated from the rest of the film's story, while also adding that it would have been "monstrously expensive" to film. Moreover, given the technical difficulties that were encountered when filming the iconic scene in which the T-Rex breaks out of the paddock (the animatronic often froze and shook in the wet), it likely wouldn't have been feasible to submerge it in water for a completely separate sequence.
That scene was loosely adapted in 2001's Jurassic Park III, which saw the Spinosaurus chase Alan Grant and the rest of the survivors in that film in a water showdown. The creature, which served as the primary antagonist of that film, swam up behind the boat that they were travelling in and very nearly succeeded in killing everyone on it until they were able to set it on fire, causing it to run off and leave them all alone.
Needless to say, it will be a thrill-ride to see it finally come to life, and it's particularly cool that Koepp chose to include it in the new film all these years later. If it's any bit as edge-of-seat as the scene is in the original novel, Jurassic World Rebirth could very well accomplish its mission to reset and reboot the franchise with a more thrilling approach.
Jurassic World Rebirth arrives in movie theaters on July 2, 2025.