Jurassic World Rebirth: The DNA of a New Beginning

Universal Pictures released the final trailer for Jurassic World Rebirth, the upcoming fourth film in the Jurassic World series. The film hits theaters on July 2, 2025, a few days after the Fourth of July weekend, and is intended to make dino-sized waves. A new start for the franchise, Rebirth is still getting back to its roots: the original Jurassic Park research island is back, leading a team of specialists is Scarlett Johansson, and saving the world from genetically modified dinosaurs is back on the menu.

Jurassic World Rebirth is the fourth film in the Jurassic World series and the seventh film in the Jurassic Park franchise, which kicked off with the 1993 Steven Spielberg film of the same name. This latest film is directed by Gareth Edwards, who previously directed 2014’s Godzilla. The script is by David Koepp, who previously wrote Jurassic Park and the Jurassic Park sequel, The Lost World (1997).

Per the official synopsis, five years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion, the world has become increasingly inhospitable to the dinosaurs. As a result, the dinosaurs have been driven into increasingly isolated equatorial survival zones that recreate their prehistoric climates. Tucked away in one of those biodomes in a tropical biosphere are the three largest known land, sea, and air dinosaurs, and in each is a genetic code that the characters believe holds the key to a life-saving drug.

Enter Scarlett Johansson’s covert ops specialist Zora Bennett, who’s been tasked to lead a team on a top-secret mission to acquire that genetic code. But their mission crosses with that of a family on a boating trip when a water-based dinosaur attack sends everyone overboard, leaving the survivors marooned on a long-forgotten island where one of the old Jurassic Park research facilities is even more ominous than the dinosaurs.

A Familiar Menagerie

Star power is abundant in the cast, with Johansson and Ali joined by Rupert Friend as the pharmaceutical company rep Martin Krebs, Jonathan Bailey as paleontologist Henry Loomis, and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as the head of the shipwrecked family, Reuben Delgado. Reuben’s children are Luna Blaise, David Iacano, and Audrina Miranda, while Bechir Sylvain is a part of the mission team. Ed Skrein and Philippine Velge also appear in as-yet-unnamed roles.

This trailer takes heavy inspiration from its first trailer, which was released in February, recycling most of the major shots, reinforcing the film’s overarching themes, and giving more of a sense of the film’s sweeping vistas. The final trailer opens on a dramatic lab scene with a worker in a hazmat suit getting trapped with a large T Rex. He yells for help just a second too late, establishing the frenetic, buzzy tone of the trailer and the film: lots of adrenaline-pumping action, nail-biting tension, and, of course, teeth-chewing dinos.

The trailer also teases one of the film’s promised big set pieces, the attempted heist of a pterosaur egg. One character identifies the animal as a Quetzalcoatlus northropi, a “flying carnivore the size of an F-16.” We also get more familiar glimpses of the “insane, man-eating raptors” and a brand-new water predator, the mosasaur. As the characters say in the trailer, this island was used by Jurassic Park researchers for the “worst of the worst,” the dinosaurs that would be too unpredictable, too aggressive, too dangerous to bring back to the park.”

Jurassic World Rebirth is setting itself up to be a new start for the franchise, but it’s also getting back to some Jurassic Park basics. The return of the original Jurassic Park research island is a nostalgia-gaming home run, while bringing in a slate of new, unpredictable threats that could go haywire at any moment is the best way to keep franchise iterations feeling fresh. Whether or not Rebirth lives up to those potentials and can truly reset the clock on the Jurassic World series is an open question. However, the film checks all the boxes for fan-service franchise filmmaking: elite characters on a high-concept science mission, morally ambiguous characters, and, of course, dinosaurs gone wild.

The trailer doesn’t stint on the dino-based mayhem and set pieces, with a few narrow escapes, including characters running through the jungle, getting stuck in submerged wreckage, and more. Johansson in particular looks set to inject the film with a grittier, more tactical sensibility into the usual rah-rah survivalism.

Jurassic World Rebirth opens in theaters nationwide on July 2, 2025, a prime weekend to try and make a dino-sized splash.