‘Jurassic World Rebirth’ Repurposes Scrapped T. Rex Scene from First Film

Jurassic World Rebirth features a real blast from the past — and not just the prehistoric kind.

The new film, which marks the seventh installment in the Jurassic Park franchise, repurposes a scene from the original 1993 movie directed by Steven Spielberg. And now, writer David Koepp is revealing exactly how (and why) it all went down.

Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Koepp — who marked his return to the franchise for the first time since 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park — shared that the technological limitations that led to one particular scene being cut from the first film are no longer a “challenge.”

The scene in question features the Delgado family — played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Audrina Miranda, Luna Blaise, and David Iacono — attempting to flee a swimming Tyrannosaurus rex while in an inflatable raft on a river.

As the outlet notes, the setup of this scene emulates one from Michael Crichton’s original 1990 novel Jurassic Park, where character Alan Grant encounters a swimming T. rex.

While the scene was shot for the 1993 film, it was ultimately cut.

“It was 1992 and nobody knew if the CGI was going to work, much less be able to make a dinosaur swim,” Koepp explained. “It was already expensive enough and with unproven technology, so it didn’t work. Water was still, in ’92, a big challenge. As you can see, it’s not anymore.”

Koepp told EW that Crichton’s Jurassic Park and The Lost World books were “extremely influential” on the new film, which arrived in theaters on July 2.

“When I reached the point in the draft where I was writing the raft sequence, I had the book here and I was typing here [gestures they were side by side]. That was pretty much straight out of the book,” he said, adding that he found other “inspiration and thoughts that were a big part of this movie.”

Koepp added that it was “interesting reading the books to refresh myself on all the science, which is exquisite, beautifully researched.”

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The new film — directed by Gareth Edwards — stars Scarlett Johansson as mercenary Zora Bennett and Jonathan Bailey as paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis as Bennett leads a dangerous expedition to secure the genetic material of the world’s three largest dinosaurs. Per an official movie description, it takes place five years after the events of 2022’s Jurassic World Dominion.

The movie also stars Rupert Friend and Mahershala Ali.

Unlike some of the recent Jurassic movies, Koepp wanted the latest installment to get away from the idea of dinosaurs living in modern society.

“I felt like in the in the last film, in particular, they took that idea all the way. Dinosaurs were nesting on the Chrysler Building and renting apartments downtown,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “I didn’t have a single idea about where to go with that.”

He “wanted to respect what occurred in the first six movies,” while somehow putting the characters “back in [the dinosaur’s] environment instead of them in ours.”

Then, while “re-reading the books,” he “found the perfect justification.”

“There’s a great speech which I just popped into the script, which was that we think these things are going to live here now, but we forget that this is a different planet,” he paraphrases. “Our landscape is completely different except this narrow band where the environment is somewhat similar to what it used to be [where dinosaurs can survive]. So let’s make dinosaurs exotic and special so that we have to go seek them out instead of, you know, fighting with them over a cab.”

Jurassic World Rebirth is in theaters now.