Jurassic World Rebirth’s Rotten Tomatoes Score Highlights A Harsh Reality For The $6Bn Franchise

Jurassic World Rebirth is another attempt at reviving the dinosaur franchise, but it comes with mixed results – especially where its reviews and Rotten Tomatoes score are concerned. Steven Spielberg’s original is blockbuster perfection, but the other Jurassic Park and World movies haven’t scaled those same dizzying heights.

Rebirth sticks pretty close to the original roadmap in its efforts to deliver something akin to Spielberg’s masterpiece: it goes back to an island – not Site A nor Site B, but a new InGen test site – and has a few scenes that attempt to capture the same horror and awe as the first movie, though it doesn’t always succeed.

It’s unclear where the franchise will go after Jurassic World Rebirth’s ending, though its opening box office suggests there will definitely be sequels (as if it was in doubt). Nonetheless, while audiences may be responding well to it – and in a sense, that’s all that matters here – it does continue a disappointing trend in terms of critical appraisal.

Jurassic World Rebirth’s Rotten Tomatoes Score Compared To The Jurassic Franchise

It’s Not The Best, But Far From The Worst

At the time of writing, Jurassic World Rebirth has a critics’ score of 51% on Rotten Tomatoes, making the movie “rotten” on the platform. In contrast, it has a more respectable 72% audience score. Though 51% is not a good score for a movie by any means, it’s actually far from the franchise’s worst, and not even in the bottom three.

Through seven entries, the Jurassic franchise has just two movies that carry a fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. And even of those, only one is a clear unanimous hit, with Jurassic World’s 72% still somewhat mixed.

Though it’s one of the biggest franchises of all time, its RT average critics score now stands at 56.4%. Even with audiences, that average only goes up to 65%, and that’s helped by Rebirth being among the more divisive entries among critics and audiences in the series.

Rebirth’s RT Score Is A Reminder Jurassic Park Shouldn’t Have Had So Many Sequels

It’s A Franchise Made From One Great Movie

Jurassic’s sequel issues, like so many franchises and IPs, can be attributed to a simple thing – to borrow a quote from Ian Malcolm, studio executives were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn’t stop to think if they should.

There’s little in Jurassic Park that sets the stage for a sequel, let alone six of them. Regardless of the title form of the rebooted series, there’s no real “world” here, but simply one contained story that, with the help of arguably the best blockbuster filmmaker to ever live, became one of the greatest movies of all time.

Even The Lost World only really exists because of the success of Spielberg’s classic, with increased calls for a sequel and Michael Crichton then eventually cracking a story idea. Even in the books, it wasn’t planned to be more than one story.

It was simply never built to be a franchise, and has stretched things so far that it’s no surprise the critical returns aren’t great. That’s not to say these movies are all bad – Rebirth is actually solidly entertaining, but that’s not necessarily the same as it being good. Certainly, it has never, and probably will never, come anywhere close to the original.

Despite Its Critical Scores, Jurassic Is A Guaranteed Box Office Winner

The Franchise Continues To Be Bulletproof

It’s easy to look at things like Rotten Tomatoes scores – or, hell, just watch some of these movies (especially something like Dominion) – and conclude that all these sequels shouldn’t have happened. Even the audience scores don’t suggest people loving them.

And then the box office flies in the face of all that. It had already made $6 billion across six movies; after Jurassic World Rebirth’s global opening weekend easily cleared $300m, you wouldn’t bet against the franchise total crossing the $7bn barrier before summer is over.

It’s why Jurassic World Rebirth’s plot point that people aren’t interested in dinosaurs doesn’t hold up, and why the constant need for things like mutant dinosaurs is frustrating. Clearly, kids and adults alike will still turn out to be entertained by a blockbuster like this.

Dinosaurs are dino-mite at the box office, with mass appeal, a nostalgic love for one true classic, and the promise of a fun (if sometimes dumb) two-hour ride that’ll hopefully offer enough thrills to be worthwhile. Wherever the franchise goes after Jurassic World Rebirth, it’s a guarantee that, regardless of quality, it will never go extinct.