When Michael Crichton first came up with the idea for a novel set in the present day in which dinosaurs from over 65 million years ago come back to life, he can have had no idea of the monster that it would become.
But when Steven Spielberg, backed by Universal Pictures, started to show an interest he had an inkling that he could be onto something big. Luckily for him, he cut a deal that saw him claiming both a rights fee and a share in the gross profits from the subsequent movie series, guaranteeing the biggest payday of his already very successful career. But perhaps what he didn’t anticipate was exactly how huge the franchise would become and how many ways it would manifest itself.
These ranged from theme park rides to video games and more, with great success. For example, one only has to look at the Jurassic Park slot game review on realmoneyslots.info to see how effectively it has transferred into this medium.
The Films
So, while it was the original novel that first started things off, it was when the original film of Jurassic Park first came out in 1993 that it began to get a mass audience. The first film was a massive financial and critical success grossing over $914 million worldwide and becoming the highest-earning movie to date.
It was no surprise that the follow-up, The Lost World, was commissioned and appeared four years later, again with Spielberg in the director’s chair. Inevitably, this didn’t have the same dramatic impact of the first film but was a financial success, all the same, despite some decidedly mixed reviews.
The third in the series was no better received, especially as Spielberg had moved on at this point and Joe Johnson took over as director. Again, the film made a profit but the feeling was that the franchise may have run its course, in filmic terms at least.
But then, in 2015, Jurassic World hit the screens. It had been in development for over a decade but script changes and other hold-ups prevented it from being made. But when it was, it became the highest grossing of the entire series at $1.6 billion. The next in the series, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, was released in 2018 and made an impressive $1.3 billion in ticket sales.
The Video games
Unsurprisingly, there have been a number of video games throughout the history of Jurassic Park, generally released to coincide with the movies themselves. The first of the series were a pair of games released by Sega and Ocean Software, both of whom had been awarded rights to create them. The second film also saw a number of games and by Jurassic Park III there were no less than six games released.
One of the more surprising of all the games that have been produced was Jurassic Park Evolution which was released in 2018. This is a business evolution game that involves building up and running Jurassic Park theme park of your own and avoiding all the dangers and problems that this can entail. Featuring characters from the last two movies in the sequence, it has received some very positive reviews.
The Rides
Another natural link for the franchise has been for rides at the various Universal Studios theme parks around the world. In 1996 their flagship Hollywood park launched the first of these with it also being repeated in Japan. In Singapore they built the Jurassic Park Rapids Adventure and in 2019 the original, in Hollywood, had a complete revamp. All the rides involve trips through the primeval landscape with dinosaurs appearing unexpectedly, sudden drops and plunges through swamps as well.
The Merchandise
It also goes without saying that there’s been some wild and wacky merchandise over the years. This has ranged from the obvious such as models of the movies’ main characters and their cold-blooded predators to the more off-the-wall items such as night vision goggles. There have also been numerous Lego sets as well as a number of animated features from the Danish toy company in the style of their Batman and other movies.
Wider Cultural Influences
One of the more surprising manifestation of the JP brand came when a baseball team in Toronto decided to award themselves the nickname “the Raptors” hoping it would transform their fortunes. They then took things even further by dubbing the fan-zone outside of the stadium, Jurassic Park.
There have also been countless exhibitions inspired by the movies, the biggest of which was probably the one held in 1993 at New York’s American Museum of Natural History which featured life-sized models used in the first film. The series has also been credited with creating the so-called Jurassic Park Generation, a whole group of high school students who have gone on to study paleontology at university.
It’s also a franchise that is far from extinct. 2021 will see the release of the sixth film in the series. Called Jurassic Park: Dominion, it also promises to be the start of a whole new era -and that means many more years for the franchise to run its course.
