Dinosaurs ruled the box office once again this weekend as “Jurassic World Rebirth” hauled in a strong $147.3 domestically over the five-day Fourth of July period to kick off what industry insiders hope will be an impressive month at movie theaters.
The holiday total for “Jurassic World” in the U.S. and Canada exceeded industry expectations. Universal Pictures’ “Jurassic World” reboot was expected to gross $120 million to $130 million during its long opening weekend, according to analyst and studio projections.
The movie unseated Apple’s Brad Pitt racing film “F1 The Movie,” which landed in second place with $26.1 million domestically, bringing its total to $109.5 million in North America, according to distributor Warner Bros.
“Rebirth’s” 2022 predecessor, “Jurassic World: Dominion,” debuted with $145 million from its first three days of release and went on to collect $1 billion globally. The new movie carries an estimated production budget of $180 million, not counting marketing costs.
Big-budget creature features have global appeal, as the numbers showed. Opening in 82 countries outside the U.S. and Canada, “Rebirth” grossed $171 million internationally. That included $41.5 million from China, proving that Hollywood movies can still do well in the Middle Kingdom despite the dominance of local production in the populous country.
The global total for “Rebirth’s” opening was $318.3 million.
Directed by Gareth Edwards (“The Creator,” “Rogue One”) and starring Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali, “Rebirth” earned unenthusiastic reviews from critics, notching a 52% approval rating on aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
The “Jurassic” franchise has seen multiple iterations since Steven Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster “Jurassic Park,” based on the popular Michael Crichton science fiction novel, wowed audiences with its combination of practical and computer-generated effects that gave the T. rex and other killer dinos their stunning realism. That film spawned not only sequels but toys, theme park attractions, animated series and video games.
Although the sequels, starting with Spielberg’s own “The Lost World,” never achieved the acclaim of the original, they continued to mint money for Universal and Spielberg’s production company, Amblin.
Prior to “Rebirth,” the “Jurassic” movies had grossed a total of roughly $6 billion worldwide, not adjusting for inflation, according to box office website The Numbers. The first “Jurassic Park” grossed $978 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo, which is equal to $1.86 billion in today’s dollars.
The latest “Jurassic” movie did not get a slot at Imax theaters, since those were taken up by “F1.” Next week, the valuable Imax real estate will be taken up by Warner Bros. and DC Studios’ “Superman.” Films shown on Imax often reap bigger box office numbers, aided in part by the higher ticket prices at those theaters, and because they’re viewed as more of a must-see event.
“Jurassic World” is the first of three big tentpole films arriving this month in theaters. In addition to “Superman,” Walt Disney Co. and Marvel Studios’ “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” opens in a few weeks.
July has historically been one of the strongest summer months at the box office, putting more pressure on these three films to deliver.
Despite big box office gains in April and May, June saw a string of underperforming films such as Lionsgate’s “John Wick” spinoff “Ballerina,” Sony Pictures’ “Karate Kid: Legends” and Disney and Pixar’s original animated effort “Elio.”
Theatrical business in June was 25% lower compared to the pre-pandemic average of June 2017, 2018 and 2019, according to David A. Gross’s FranchiseRe movie industry newsletter. It was also down 5.3% compared to last June, which saw big hits like Disney and Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” and Sony’s “Bad Boys: Ride or Die.”
“We see this ebb and flow,” said Shawn Robbins, founder of the website Box Office Theory. “These next four to five weeks will certainly give us a sense of how to grade the summer overall.”
Hold on to your water glasses because you can hear the plot of “Jurassic World Rebirth” coming from a mile away. A ragtag group of adventurers land on a remote island planning to exploit dinosaur DNA — and some of them get chomped. The only new thing about this seventh installment is the cast: Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali as freelance covert operatives Zora and Duncan, Jonathan Bailey as paleontologist Henry Loomis and Rupert Friend as a pharmaceutical titan named Martin who wants to treat coronary disease by harvesting samples from three massive reptile hearts. Gauging by the response every time this sequel has come up in conversation, it should have been subtitled: “This Time There’s No Chris Pratt.”
I went to the theater with my own heart as big as a Titanosaur’s. (Goofy name aside, it’s a real herbivore and you’ll see a herd of them.) After all, screenwriter David Koepp wrote the screenplay for the 1993 original and the franchise’s latest director, Gareth Edwards, made a serviceable “Godzilla.”
Alas, Edwards has made “Godzilla” again. “Jurassic World Rebirth” is a straight monster movie with zero awe or prestige. It’s incurious about its stomping creatures and barely invested in the humans either, tasking Johansson and most of the cast to play fairly similar shades of hardy and determined. You’ll see a nod to the 1962 adventure “One Million Years B.C.” (you know: Raquel Welch, fur bikini), which is more of a template than a kitschy joke. There isn’t a shiver of surprise about who gets the chomp, only disappointment that the fatalities are so bloodless — they’re mild even for PG-13.
Some of this ennui is by design. The narrative backdrop is that after 32 years of who-coulda-thunk-it rampages, humankind is tired of dealing with the darned things. Audiences can relate.
To establish this miserliness of spirit, the present-day scenes start with a Brooklyn traffic jam caused by an escaped sauropod lying collapsed and dying on the side of the road. It’s the same species that transformed Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum into giddy, glassy-eyed children, only now drained of all majesty. Some creep has even spray-painted its hindquarters with graffiti.
Plenty more dinosaurs will arrive in the film’s two-hour-plus running time: swooping Quetzalcoatlus, splashing Mosasaurus, frilled Dilophosaurus and a bitty Whoknowswhatasaurus that Ali’s Duncan keeps in a bamboo birdcage by his boat dock in Suriname. But the only one that made me feel anything was that pathetic sauropod abandoned like a sidewalk sofa.
A beat later, “Rebirth” cuts to a shuttering museum exhibit where workmen are trashing their copy of that iconic banner that reads “When dinosaurs ruled the earth.” The original “Jurassic Park” inspired a generation of kids to dream of scientific discoveries. This era is throwing in the towel.
The action sets sail with a hefty oceanic sequence where Edwards leans on his expertise in sluicing fins and underwater ka-thumps. Our heroes also scoop up a rather ungrateful shipwrecked family: yachtsman Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his daughters Isabella (Audrina Miranda) and Teresa (Luna Blaise) and Teresa’s good-for-nothing boyfriend, Xavier (David Iacono). Initially, we can’t wait for Iacono’s louse to get eaten but we come to treasure his comic relief, particularly when Xavier wanders off to relieve himself next to a nest of velociraptors. Danger lurks and the doofus just stands around with his johnson in his hand.
Eventually, the crew makes land on Ile Saint-Hubert near French Guinea, where a genetic dinosaur laboratory was evacuated 17 years earlier. In an opening flashback, we learn that a technician concocting a freakish T. rex littered a Snickers wrapper, causing a chain reaction that within two minutes resulted in the snacker becoming a snack.
You may consider yourself inured to product placement. Even so, its use here is brazen and strange, from this case of death by chocolate to an “E.T.” embezzlement in which Isabella befriends a baby Aquilops with red rope licorice. There’s even a scene in an abandoned convenience store which, despite a decade and a half left in the custody of pesky dinosaurs, the snack labels remain tidily pointed toward the camera. At least that setting has a modified raptor pausing at a soda cooler to admire its reflection.
I don’t think Johansson and Ali will take as much pride in “Rebirth,” assuming they bother to watch it. Both get through the film without embarrassing themselves, in part because neither is very committed. Johansson’s tough security expert swaggers, Ali smiles and our sturdy goodwill for both actors keeps us from holding the movie against them. Early on, the two get one scene together where they put on a pretense of speaking in shorthand about the emotional costs of a career in Blackwater-style skulduggery. It has the air of a stretch before buckling in for a long haul flight.
This is composer Alexandre Desplat’s “Jurassic” debut and he dutifully reworks John Williams’ famous notes of wonder and yearning a few ways, like a subtle tinkling when Bailey’s strapping science geek imagines the joy of witnessing a dinosaur not in a zoo or a theme park, but in the wild. Bailey is a fine actor and his Loomis would be the soul of the movie if he wasn’t battling for screen time. He’s the only character who seems to like dinosaurs — everyone else sees them as dollar signs or boogeymen.
The series itself has gotten so bored with the beasties that it continues to invent new ugly mutants. “Rebirth” unleashes the Distortus rex — imagine a parakeet’s head on a bodybuilding cockroach. All the dinos struggle to feel convincing as they seem to change size every time you look at them (and the CG backdrops are chintzy). Yet, I still prefer the trusty regulars like the amphibious Spinosaurs, who resemble dog-paddling hellhounds, the pecking Quetzalcoatlus that gulps people like sardines and, of course, the Tyrannosaurus rex, now striped and able to hide in ways that defy physics but at least get an audible chortle.
“Rebirth” is a confounding title for a downbeat entry that’s mostly preoccupied by death and neglect. Who knows whether we’re at the head or tail of the Anthropocene, but the movie seems weary of our dominion. “I doubt if we make it to even 1 million,” Loomis admits, adding that he hopes to die in shallow silt so he can become a fossil too. With the franchise officially out of ideas, how about skipping to “Jurassic Park: One Million Years A.D.” so a futuristic species can resurrect us for some malevolent fun and games?
‘Jurassic World Rebirth’
Rated: PG-13, for intense sequences of violence/action, bloody images, some suggestive references, language and a drug reference
An enormous shadow hovers over the characters in “Jurassic World: Rebirth,” and it’s the same one that has been dogging composer Alexandre Desplat ever since he was a teenager in Paris.
That shadow? The music of John Williams.
“He’s such a legend for all of us,” says Desplat, 63, on a Zoom call from London, where he’s been burning the midnight oil on the score for Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming “Frankenstein.” “He’s just the only one to follow.”
Like Williams, Desplat is now a grizzled (though painterly handsome) veteran himself, with hundreds of films to his name. He’s already completed three scores this year alone — for the French-Swedish Palme d’Or nominee “Eagles of the Republic,” Wes Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme” and this week’s “Jurassic” heavyweight.
He’s also making his North American conducting debut on July 15 in a grand survey of his film career at the Hollywood Bowl, a fitting, if overdue, coronation of his two-decade reign as an A-list composer in America.
When Desplat began scoring Hollywood films in the early 2000s, his music swept in like a breath of fresh French air — elegant, restrained, melodic, idiosyncratic — and the list of filmmakers who sought him out reads like a sizable section of the Criterion Closet: Terrence Malick, Ang Lee, Kathryn Bigelow, David Fincher, Jonathan Glazer, Greta Gerwig.
“He’s the last tycoon of American movie music,” Desplat said in 2010 of his idol John Williams. “He drew a line and we just have to be brave and strong enough to try and challenge this line. With humility, but with desire. It’s a kind of battle.”
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
His ride-or-die partner is Anderson, who first employed him on “Fantastic Mr. Fox” in 2007 and who teed up Desplat’s first Oscar win with “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” (He’s been nominated eleven times.) May’s “The Phoenician Scheme” marked their seventh collaboration.
“As I started being a film composer, I had my idols in sight — of course Hitchcock and Herrmann, David Lean and [Maurice] Jarre, [François] Truffaut and Georges Delerue,” Desplat told me in 2014. “All these duets were strong and they showed how important the intimacy between a director and a composer would be for both of them. It’s not only good for the film, it’s good for the composers, because these composers actually developed their own style by doing several movies with the same director.”
In a town too often filled with generic, factory-farmed scores, his were like a gourmet French meal, even though he grew up on the same diet of American movies and their iconic scores. The young Desplat was obsessed with U.S. culture — listening to jazz, watching baseball and the Oscars — and he decided he wanted to score movies after he heard “Star Wars” in 1977. Emblazoned on the cover of that iconic black album were the words “Composed and Conducted by John Williams.”
“That,” Desplat told his friend at the time, “is what I want to do.”
It’s fitting and kind of funny that two decades after charming audiences with a delicate, waltzing score for the 2003 Scarlett Johansson prestige picture “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” the composer is now promoting a stomping monster score for a blockbuster behemoth starring Johanssson and a bunch of CGI dinosaurs — and tampering with John Williams’ sacred musical DNA.
“Jurassic World: Rebirth” isn’t the first time he’s had to brave the T-rex-sized footprints of his hero: Desplat scored the final two films in the “Harry Potter” series, and he was also the first composer on “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” He left the latter when Tony Gilroy took over the project from original director Gareth Edwards, and before composing any notes.
“I went as far as the change of directors and change of plans,” Desplat explains, “and the weeks passing by, and then I had to move on because I wanted to work with Luc Besson” (on 2017’s “Star Wars”-esque “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets”).
“I dreamed of writing for symphonic scores,” Desplat says, “but for many years there was no way I could do it in French cinema, because the movies didn’t offer that, or the producer didn’t offer that. I had to learn how to sound big with very little amount of musicians.”
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
Much like his work on “Harry Potter,” Desplat’s odes to Williams in “Rebirth” are more whispers than shouts — though there are a handful of overt declarations of both the iconic anthem and hymn for Steven Spielberg’s 1993 dino-masterpiece. More subtle homages arrive in his use of solo piano and ghostly choir, and in the opening three notes of his motif for the team led by Johansson’s character — a tune that almost begins like Williams’ “Jurassic” hymn.
“So there’s a connection,” Desplat says. “I take the baton and I move away from it.”
He composed new leitmotifs for wonder, for adventure, for danger. His score, much like the original, is an amusement park ride full of sudden drops, humor and family-friendly terror, with a few moments of cathartic, introspective relief.
Mostly, Edwards kept pushing him for more hummable motifs.
“When I was tempted to go back to something more abstract — you know, French movie,” Desplat says, winking — “he would just ask me to go back towards John Williams’ inspiration of writing great motifs that you can remember and are catchy.”
Desplat worries this is becoming an extinct art in Hollywood. “I don’t hear much of that in many movies that I watch,” he says. “It’s kind of an ambient texture — which is the easiest thing to create.”
In college, he would listen to the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” score on a loop, and as his own scoring career developed, he was paying keen attention to John Williams’ more intimate chamber scores like “The Accidental Tourist” and “Presumed Innocent” — as well as juggernauts like “Jurassic Park.” Besides the music itself seeping in, he learned that it was important to score every kind of film, no matter how big or small. Williams’ work also taught him “that I could have something elegant, classical, but with some seeds of jazz in the chords or in the way the melody evolves.”
Whenever he hears someone talking dismissively about Williams, Desplat gets defensive. “I want to punch them,” he says, only half kidding.
“He’s the master, what can I say?” Desplat told me in 2010. “He’s the man. He’s the last tycoon of American movie music. So that’s everything said there. He drew a line and we just have to be brave and strong enough to try and challenge this line. With humility, but with desire. It’s a kind of battle.”
Jonathan Bailey and Scarlett Johansson in the movie “Jurassic World Rebirth.”
(Jasin Boland / Universal Pictures )
When Desplat received his first Academy Award nomination, for “The Queen” in 2007, the one person who called from Los Angeles to congratulate him was Maurice Jarre, composer of “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Doctor Zhivago.”
Desplat had met the French legend a few times over the years, including an early invitation to a mixing session for the 1990 film, “After Dark, My Sweet.” Desplat was aghast when he saw director James Foley taking away Jarre’s melody and all the various musical elements on the mixing board, save for a simple electronic thump.
The young composer expressed his dismay and Jarre calmly said: “It’s his film. I have to accept that.”
“That’s a lesson that I learned very early on,” Desplat says. “I’ve never forgotten that, because it’s still the same,” he laughs.
He was also warmly received as a young man by Georges Delerue, the great serenader of the French New Wave in films like “Jules and Jim” and “Contempt.” “They were so kind,” Desplat says, “such sweet men, both of them.” (Michel Legrand? Not so much, Desplat says: “He said awful things about me in books.”)
What they all have in common — besides a penchant for composing beautiful music — is the defiant, transatlantic leap from the French film industry where they started to the highest perch in Hollywood. Jarre left Paris in the early 1960s after the enormous success of “Lawrence” and never looked back, forging meaningful partnerships with directors like Peter Weir and Adrian Lyne. Delerue uprooted from Paris to the Hollywood Hills after winning his first Oscar in 1980 and scored a few hits including “Steel Magnolias” and “Beaches.”
“I really think that people who work a lot are lazy,” says Desplat, who has already completed three scores this year. “That’s why they work a lot — otherwise they wouldn’t work at all.”
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
Desplat started professionally in France in 1985 and wrote roughly 50 scores before “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” the English-language film that put him on Hollywood’s radar. He continues to do French films amid the summer blockbusters and American art house pictures.
“I dreamed of writing for symphonic scores,” Desplat says, “but for many years there was no way I could do it in French cinema, because the movies didn’t offer that, or the producer didn’t offer that. I had to learn how to sound big with very little amount of musicians.”
He enjoys the freedom of a big-budget project. “To be able to have a studio say, ‘Go, write what you need to write.’ The director, he wants an orchestra, he wants 95 musicians. Great! They don’t even say anything. You just go and you record. They book the studio. They book the musicians.”
Still, the limitations he trained under gave Desplat some of his greatest strengths: creativity, resourcefulness, speed. He had to orchestrate everything himself, which means his music bears a distinctive fingerprint. And composing for small, sometimes unorthodox ensembles gave his music a clean, transparent signature as opposed to the all-too-typical wall of mud.
He can’t say much about his 100-minute score for “Frankenstein,” which he just finished recording with a giant orchestra and choir at both Abbey Road and AIR Studios, and which comes out on Netflix in November. The reason he does so many films, Desplat proposes, is because he’s lazy.
“I really think that people who work a lot are lazy. That’s why they work a lot — otherwise they wouldn’t work at all.”
