Jurassic World became 2015’s biggest movie when it grossed over $1.6 billion at the worldwide box office earlier this year, and while there are those who believe Star Wars: The Force Awakens is going to top that, the movie becoming the third highest grossing release of all-time definitely ensures the franchise is back and here to say for the foreseeable future.

What Colin Trevorrow’s role in that will be remains to be seen. We know he’s writing the sequel with Derek Connolly, but with Star Wars Episode IX on the horizon for the filmmaker, chances are he won’t be at the helm of the follow-up which is set to be released in 2018.

Talking on the Jurassic Cast Podcast recently, Trevorrow went into detail about how how this new trilogy was conceived, touching on the Jurassic World sequel being more than just another two hours of human on the run from dinosaurs and how a quote from Steve Spielberg’s Jurassic Park actually helmed him to come up with the concept of these movies.

We looked at it as a trilogy from the very beginning. We designed the whole thing that way. And, honestly, the whole trilogy is articulated in Jurassic Park. Jurassic World is all based on Ian Malcom’s quote: ‘you stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you knew what you had, you’d packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox and now you want to sell it.’ That, to me, is Jurassic World. That’s why I had all the product placement, that’s what it was. So with Jurassic World 2 it’s: ‘dinosaurs and man separated by 65 million years of evolution have been thrown back into the mix together – how can we know what to expect?’. That’s not the exact quote, but you get the idea. And that’s why its exciting the movie did well. I had a beginning, a middle and an end and it was designed this way. So now we get to play that out.

It’ll be a different kind of film and the audience has given us kind of permission to take this to the next level. And I don’t mean in scale. I feel very strongly that this is not ‘more dinosaurs’ or ‘bigger dinosaurs’, it’s about using this as a starting point to discover our relationship with these animals and with animals in general, and the dynamic that was created by bringing them back to life.

We made [Jurassic World] with the fans very much in mind and I’m not going to forget that, but we’ve seen a lot of ‘dinosaurs chasing people around on an island’ movies. And I think you guys and the general audience are going to be down to explore where else we can go. Owen is going to be in it, Claire is in it and neither are going to be in the same place we left them in the first movie. And even though Claire is the one who evolves the most over the trilogy, it’s her story that mirrors this changing world. Owen has shit to deal with. They’ve both opened Pandora’s Box in Jurassic World and both of them are responsible for different elements of it. And I think the way these characters are connected to these circumstances of what’s happening, it’s different than previous films. It’s not ‘let’s manufacture a way to get them somewhere’, they’re embedded into it now in a way that us storytellers are able to keep them involved without it feeling contrived.

Jurassic World certainly started laying the groundwork for what a sequel might entail, but the pressure is going to be on whoever takes the helm to both live up to this latest instalment of the franchise (both financially and otherwise) and to continue to tell the story in an effective manner. Of course, with Trevorrow involved in a writing capacity, we really shouldn’t worry!