‘Jurassic World Rebirth' set to take a bite out of July 4 weekend box office
Jurassic World Rebirth, a soft reboot of the adventure series, is already stomping its way to a massive opening across the July 4 holiday. The movie, which stars Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, and Jonathan Bailey, gobbled up $28 million of opening-day grosses, on its way to a projected $127.5 million domestic haul over the five-day weekend.
More from Gold Derby
'Back to the Future' at 40: All the ways the Robert Zemeckis classic was snubbed by the Oscars
How new seasons of 'The Bear' and 'Squid Game' will impact their Emmy hopes for previous seasons
That number is only half of the story, as Rebirth is currently eying a global opening of more than $250 million.
The likely victory is far from unexpected, especially among Gold Derby readers, who predicted that outcome at a rate of 95.7 percent.
While impressive, that domestic figure is a step down from the previous Chris Pratt-led World trilogy, the smallest of which — Dominion — still managed to pull in $145 million across three days.
Without any other new wide releases out in theaters this weekend, Rebirth's main competition will be Brad Pitt and the second lap of last week's champion, F1: The Movie, which opened to an impressive $57 million. Industry eyes will also be on M3GAN 2.0 to see if the horror-to-action-comedy sequel will be able to turn things around after a disappointing $10 million opening.
Jurassic World RebirthDirector: Gareth EdwardsThe potential for a new life-saving drug sends a team back to a dino-infested island to collect DNA samples from three large species of prehistoric beasts. The film, which runs two hours and 14 minutes, is rating PG-13. Jurassic World Rebirth is currently categorized as "rotten" with a Tomatometer score of 54 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The Metacritic score isn't much better at 52 with "mixed" reviews.
Best of Gold Derby
Everything to know about 'The Batman 2': Returning cast, script finalized
Tom Cruise movies: 17 greatest films ranked worst to best
'It was wonderful to be on that ride': Christian Slater talks his beloved roles, from cult classics ('Heathers,' 'True Romance') to TV hits ('Mr. Robot,' 'Dexter: Original Sin')
Click here to read the full article.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Jurassic World Rebirth Original Ending Detailed by Director Gareth Edwards
The original ending to killed off a major character. Universal Pictures' Jurassic World Rebirth is now playing in United States theaters. Directed by Gareth Edwards, the movie stars Scarlett Johansson as Zora Bennett, Mahershala Ali as Duncan Kincaid, Jonathan Bailey as Dr. Henry Loomis, and Rupert Friend as Martin Krebs. Speaking with Variety, Edwards confirmed that he originally killed off Ali's character during the final moments of the movie. 'It flipped back and forth a couple of times. In the draft I first read, he died, and I thought, 'That's great!' We started to pursue Mahershala, and for whatever reason, it felt like, well, if we're going to get Mahershala, we've got to keep him alive, right? But then Mahershala read it, and his only main note was, 'Can we kill him?' I agreed, so I joined Team Mahershala, and we both pushed to have him killed; the script changed back to him dying.' Edwards said the studio asked him to film two different versions of the film's ending: one where Ali's character lives and one where he dies. He continued, 'When we edited the movie and did the director's cut, I ended up sending the version that had him dying. It went well, but the studio said, 'Oh, it's great. But can we just see the version where he lives?' We hadn't put it together, so we went back and edited that, and everyone just said, 'It's got to be that.' We did two test screenings, and the reaction to him living, everyone was a lot happier. 'I still wasn't sure about it until the screening in New York. The moment where this flare appears revealing that he's lived got this massive applause, and I felt a little tear welling in my eye. Hats off to the studio. I'm glad they made me shoot that extra little section because I think it's probably the strongest part of the film.' Originally reported by Brandon Schreur at ComingSoon.
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
The ‘Jurassic' rebirth that never happened: How an Oscar-nominated screenwriter almost took the franchise in a wild new direction
Jurassic World: Rebirth stomps into theaters this holiday weekend, looking to sink its teeth into the July 4 box office and revitalize a franchise that even the most dedicated dino-heads would agree is starting to feel a little prehistoric. Starring Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, and Mahershala Ali, the seventh film in the Jurassic series unfolds on a new island where dinosaurs roam freely... and humans are prey. While the Rebirth reviews are mixed, the movie posted a $28 million opening day, with a projected $127.5 million gross over the four-day weekend. The Rotten Tomatoes audience scores are also coming in a smidgen higher than the Tomatometer, indicating that these digitally enhanced dinosaurs continue to be a big summer movie draw. More from Gold Derby Kesha's 'Period': What critics are saying about the singer's first independent album Michael Madsen remembered: All his Oscar-nominated films, from 'WarGames' to 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood' But Jurassic still seems like a franchise in need of some fresh creative DNA. And, as it happens, a bold new direction emerged in the early 2000s from an unlikely source — Oscar-nominated screenwriter and pioneering independent filmmaker John Sayles. In the wake of 2001's underwhelming Jurassic Park III, the writer-director of critically adored dramas like Eight Men Out, Return of the Secaucus Seven, and Matewan was hired to pen Jurassic Park IV, and the wild result — which you can still find online — remains one of the greatest "what ifs?" in Hollywood blockbuster history. Here's a look back at how the Jurassic series was nearly reborn in a very different way two decades ago, long before Rebirth. At first glance, Jurassic Park would seem to have little in common with the thematically weighty adult dramas that were Sayles's stock in trade. Starting with 1980's Return of the Secaucus 7, the Schenectady, N.Y.-born filmmaker won acclaim and awards attention for films like Baby It's You, City of Hope and Limbo. His Oscar track record included Best Original Screenplay nominations for 1992's Passion Fish and 1996's Lone Star. But in between passion projects, Sayles made a living as a writer and script doctor for hire specializing in genre fare. His first credited screenplay is producer Roger Corman's Jaws rip-off, Piranha, and Sayles also penned Alligator and The Howling and later did punch-up drafts on Apollo 13 and Mimic. In the early '80s, he was hired by Steven Spielberg to flesh out a script called Night Skies that, according to Hollywood legend, was the early genesis for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Spielberg, of course, went on to launch the Jurassic franchise with 1993's inaugural entry and its 1997 sequel, The Lost World before handing the third installment to The Rocketeer's Joe Johnston. As development began on Jurassic Park IV, screenwriter William Monahan — who later won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for The Departed — was brought on to offer his take. But Spielberg seemed to think that the next installment would require a little bit of the genre art and science that only Sayles could provide. The Sayles draft of Jurassic Park IV takes audiences back to where it all began — the island of Isla Nublar, where Wayne Knight's duplicitous smuggler Dennis Nedry lost that can of shaving cream hiding John Hammond's propriety reptile DNA while walking through the jungle in the rain. (Cue up Weird Al's "Jurassic Park" anthem now.) Eager to get those samples back, Hammond dispatches mercenary Nick Harris on a search-and-recovery mission with the intention of creating a new strain of dinosaurs that can't reproduce, but can serve as a check on the marauding giant lizards that have already escaped their confines. Harris locates Nedry's missing shaving cream, but also discovers that he's not alone on Isla Nublar. The island is now in the control of the Grendel Corporation, which has its own designs on that DNA. The mercenary is eventually captured and flown to a remote castle in Switzerland where he learns Grendel's endgame — creating a squad of lethal soldiers that are made up of dog, dinosaur, and human genetic material. Faster than you can say "lizard people," though, that army turns on their creators as Nick aids them in bringing the Grendel Corporation down. In the closing moments, Harris announces that he returning the missing embryos to Hammond as a loose dino chomps down on the last remaining bad guy. Reading the script now, you can't argue that Jurassic Park IV isn't in the spirit of the loosey-goosey genre movies that Sayles once wrote for Corman. But that's ultimately not the spirit that a big budget Hollywood franchise like Jurassic Park was seeking in the early 2000s. Ultimately, the Jurassic franchise took an extended time-out, finally relaunching in 2015 with Jurassic World, directed by Colin Trevorrow, who admitted to reading — and enjoying — the never-made Sayles script. "I liked it in a lot of ways," he told ScreenCrush that year. "What was going on was bananas, but that's not a bad thing! My movie is bananas. There's a lot in there to like. It's nuts in a lot of the right ways." And, as some dino sleuths have noted, several of the ideas contained in Sayles's script found their way into the Jurassic World movies in different forms. Chris Pratt's Owen Grady, for example, is a former Navy lieutenant who squads up with his own crew of Velociraptors. And much of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom unfolds in a secluded estate housing a cavernous research facility where new strains of battle-ready dinosaurs are being engineered and sold to the highest bidders. In a 2016 interview with Indiewire, Sayles spoke briefly about his brush with Jurassic and his approach to genre fare in general. "Genre can be used for all kinds of purposes," he noted. "Sometimes you can just do straight genre ... and other times, you can kind of subvert it a little bit. I'm more interested in the ones that are a little more self-conscious." "They could probably shoot the script that I wrote today and it would different enough from what they did make," Sayles added. With an eighth Jurassic film likely already in development, here's a second chance for Universal to make an installment that has an Oscar nominee's fingerprints all over of Gold Derby Everything to know about 'The Batman 2': Returning cast, script finalized Tom Cruise movies: 17 greatest films ranked worst to best 'It was wonderful to be on that ride': Christian Slater talks his beloved roles, from cult classics ('Heathers,' 'True Romance') to TV hits ('Mr. Robot,' 'Dexter: Original Sin') Click here to read the full article.
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
‘Jurassic World: Rebirth': Reviews are split on whether a ‘stripped-down' sequel can be too stripped-down
It's been three years since Jurassic World: Dominion, the successful-but-well-liked trilogy capper, and in the timeline of movie studios, that's practically an eon. So the dinosaurs are once again walking the earth, this time with stars Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, and Jonathan Bailey. The seventh installment in the Jurassic series finds director Gareth Edwards and original Park adapter David Koepp attempting a more back-to-basics approach — to mixed results, according to critics, who have just begun to weigh in. More from Gold Derby The most likely Oscars nominations from the first half of 2025 2025's 10 best TV shows so far: 'Adolescence,' 'Cobra Kai,' and 'Severance' among our editors' top picks "Jurassic World: Rebirth serves as a reset of sorts, bringing back not a single one of its former cast members, but instead allowing screenwriter David Koepp to restore what worked so well about the original film," write Variety's Peter Debruge. But to what extent those efforts were successful is where the reviews are divided. Some, like The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney, can appreciate a strong cast, even if they're working with some recycled (but still effective) thrills. "Returning screenwriter David Koepp cowrote the 1993 Spielberg original with sci-fi author Michael Crichton, on whose books the movies were based, as well as the 1997 sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park," Rooney writes. "While Koepp did not write Jurassic Park III, he had a hand in shaping the plotline. It's predominantly the first and third installments that yield the abundant déjà vu moments in Rebirth.... But whatever the new movie lacks in originality, it makes up for in propulsive narrative drive, big scares and appealing new characters played by a terrific cast — even if they are mostly cut from an existing mold." Others, like IndieWire's David Ehrlich, found the pulled-back scale of the story as somewhat vacuous, possibly the result of an over-involved studio. "Rebirth certainly isn't any better than the previous five sequels that have already hatched from the original (though I'm relieved to report that it's less bloated and self-impressed than the last three), but the sheer nothingness of its spectacle — combined with a complete non-story that feels like it was 65 million studio notes in the making — allows it to become a singularly perfect legacy for Steven Spielberg's classic about how people lack the power to control their own creations," he writes. What sort of "nothingness," you ask? It's a thread that Vanity Fair's Richard Lawson picks up in his review, which found Rebirth's attempts at both horror and wonder to be lacking. "That mellow tone becomes ever more of a problem as the film unfolds," he write. "Nothing is terribly urgent. The new genetically modified creatures are dull, needless modifications, including one that looks exactly like the Rancor from Return of the Jedi. There's some grief stuff thrown into the mix, because that is just part of the screenwriting equation these days, but otherwise this is a decidedly unserious movie. Edwards, a master at visuals but perhaps less keen as a storyteller, manages some grand imagery. Nighttime scenes are lit with beautiful washes of color; our intrepid heroes are surrounded by lush, primordial flora. But there is no real sense of consequence, not even when Edwards crassly trots out composer John Williams's gorgeous main JP theme from 1993 — hoping and failing to summon the ghost of an old wonder." The film currently has a middling score of 56 percent on review-aggegation sites Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. While the critics may be divided on things like character and story, there's one thing that most people in general can agree on: Jonathan Bailey. "Bailey has the purest, most moving moment in the film," writes Entertainment Weekly's Maureen Lee Lenker. "His electric joy and overwhelming awe at getting to actually touch a dinosaur after studying them for years are so earnest and charming that they have the power to make the entire audience feel like a child again. The scene and Bailey's abundant rapture serve as a poignant reminder of the movie-making magic that made Jurassic Park a hit in the first place." Jurassic Park: Rebirth opens in theaters on July 2. Best of Gold Derby Everything to know about 'The Batman 2': Returning cast, script finalized Tom Cruise movies: 17 greatest films ranked worst to best 'It was wonderful to be on that ride': Christian Slater talks his beloved roles, from cult classics ('Heathers,' 'True Romance') to TV hits ('Mr. Robot,' 'Dexter: Original Sin') Click here to read the full article.
