On Wednesday, director J.A. Bayona tweeted out the first image from Jurassic World 2, showing a young girl in front of an elaborate display of dinosaur skeletons.
Though the series has always pretended to be something more, a great deal of the Jurassic Park series’ appeal continues to be the same as any 1950’s creature feature or 80’s slasher: watching “deserving” targets die horribly. And after Jurassic Park , with its saintly interpretation of InGen founder John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), the series settled on one of cinema’s most popular targets of violence: rich buttholes. Gennaro, Peter Ludlow, Masrani: dinosaur food, all of ‘em. Movies are the only place where rich people, as a class, are in more danger than everyone else. The rich character, usually a jerk, will die horribly for our pleasure. If the first image from Jurassic World 2 is any indication, in summer 2018 we’ll have another richie to throw atop the cinematic pyre.
You can see Bayona’s (tweet of the first image from Jurassic World 2 below:
So excited to show you this!! A first look of the new Jurassic adventure. #JW2 pic.twitter.com/U7eJRANXgg
— JA Bayona (@FilmBayona) March 8, 2017
It shows the back of some sort of human juvenile, facing a richly appointed hardwood room loaded with dinosaur skeletons. At first it looks like a museum, but who would go look at dinosaur skeletons in a museum when a cloned dinosaur army is busy taking over Costa Rican islands? Look closely and you’ll see there are no signs or explanatory labels — this is a private collection.
Who does it belong to? We don’t know, but the Jurassic World 2 cast is loaded with people who’d be perfect rich villains/victims. There’s James Cromwell, who’d play a fantastic billionaire going down a T. Rex gullet. Then there’s Toby Jones, who could play a rich mad scientist type and get disemboweled by the raptors he engineers to sell subprime mortgages. Or how about the most recent addition to the cast, Geraldine Chaplin? She’d have to be a pretty big villain for us to root and toot at dinosaurs eating a stately old woman, but if we cheered at Dolores Umbridge getting carted off by centaurs surely we’re bloodthirsty enough to watch Geraldine Chaplin get pecked apart by compies.
Whoever this rich and doomed dinosaur patron turns out to be, several someones will be getting eaten when Jurassic World 2 comes out June 22, 2018.
