Longtime Jurassic Park fans were left disappointed when every single trailer and the majority of TV spots for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom featured Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm, only for it to transpire that his contributions were limited exclusively to bookending exposition.
Clearly, Colin Trevorrow has taken the criticism on board, with the director promising that Goldblum, along with fellow returnees Sam Neill and Laura Dern, will have major parts to play in next summer’s Dominion. Neill already teased that the gang isn’t getting back together for the sake of a scene or two, and while speaking to IGN about the five-minute prologue that landed online yesterday, Trevorrow said the original stars have a significant presence.
“Ellie and Grant and Malcolm are on this full adventure, they’re a huge part of it, and equal partners to Owen and Claire and Maisie and our new characters we’ve brought in. The challenge of a movie like that is to give every character their due, to honor everybody. That’s part of what this prologue is about; I felt that if we didn’t have this in the story, that the T-Rex wasn’t being honored. She’s a character too.”
Chris Pratt already likened Jurassic World: Dominion to Avengers: Endgame in how it brings together the biggest, best and brightest the franchise has had to offer in an epic race against time to save the human race, but there’s also the real danger that it could lead to an overload of nostalgia, as we’ve seen already in countless legacy sequels.
That doesn’t mean it’s not going to be fun seeing it happen, though, and now that our appetites have been whetted by the prologue, the next step is Jurassic World: Dominion revealing some footage of its A-list names in action.