Jurassic World: Rebirth director Gareth Edwards promises a very simple “survival story” and says they put the actors in water that poisonous snakes call home

There’s a new Jurassic World movie coming next summer, after going from ‘just announced’ to production to post in the span of less than a year. The trick? Original Jurassic Park scribe David Koepp had knocked out a script in secret. Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) is directing and ready to talk a bit about the process of shooting in natural environments.

Entertainment Weekly is currently running a bunch of looks at upcoming 2025 movies, and of course, Universal and Amblin’s Jurassic World: Rebirth is among them. While the powers that be continue to refuse to show us dinosaurs (and other prehistoric creatures) until the first trailer arrives, we already know quite a lot about the cast of adventurers and some of the dangers they’ll have to face… and also faced in real life.

“When we were scouting them, we saw poisonous water snakes, massive ones that we had to catch. We kept it quiet from the actors as they spent a whole day wading through the same area. And there were giant spiders that were poisonous and stuff on the edge of the trees,” Edwards admitted. We’ve known for a while that production was mostly done in Thailand and Malta’s natural locations, and of course, that typically involves getting hands dirty and feet wet. Well, it sounds like the cast and crew also had to dodge animal hazards that are very real.

It all added to the overall vibe the director and screenwriter were going for, which is that of a “a little adventure odyssey across this island, a survival story, really.” Looking back at the recent Jurassic World trilogy shepherded by Colin Trevorrow (who’s now stepped back), the long-running movie series saw a necessary evolution and doubled-down on a sci-fi angle that actually felt quite faithful to Michael Crichton’s original novels. That said, much of the execution could’ve been better, so Universal and Amblin returning to the basics with this one was sort of predictable. All in all, it’s sounding like a more interesting version of Jurassic Park 3, a fun but hollow island adventure flick that didn’t have much to say about the dangers of rampant capitalism and mankind messing with nature.

“The three most colossal dinosaurs of land, sea, and air within this biosphere hold genetic material precious to a pharmaceutical company that hopes to use the dino DNA to create a life-saving drug for humanity.” That’s part of the core premise of Rebirth, which seems to be running with a simple plot and structure, but is acknowledging the state of the world after the events of Fallen Kingdom and Dominion, which saw dinosaurs and other extinct creatures reaching the mainland and being created by all sorts of huge companies and no-good-doers. Now, these animals are “dying out” in most of the globe’s regions but the tropical ones, so expect to see more jungle-like environments in the future even if nothing is being retconned.

The full interview is well worth a read, as it digs a bit into the main cast, led by Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, and Mahershala Ali, and the angle that Edwards is gunning for. Expect marketing to properly kick off in the coming weeks. The movie will roar and charge into theaters worldwide on July 2, 2025.