Jurassic Park

It’ll take a very large cage to contain this franchise, but lets have a look why.

Like most franchises, the Jurassic Park world was extended from the debut film to make money. However unlike a lot of other franchises from the nineties the Jurassic Park debut film made a phenomenal amount of money. In fact, twenty years later Jurassic Park is confidently listed as the 18th highest grossing film of all time. The only other nineties film to beat it is Titantic and the next is Independence Day ranked far below in 38th place.

This means that the second film, Jurassic Park: The Lost World, had to outperform the first film on all aspects: bigger better production, more dinosaur screen time, more action and more ticket sales.

With the exception of ticket sales, this challenge isn’t actually that hard when looking at the original Jurassic Park stats. For example the iconic dinosaur from the first film is of course the T-Rex but she only appeared twice. On the other hand The Lost World ups the ante by including two full size Tyrannosaurus and even a baby T-Rex showing them a total of 6 times.

The Lost World also increases the death toll at the hands (or maybe jaws) of dinosaurs from 4 to 11 between the first and second film. It even doubles the amount of people eaten by them. As the first film was predominately set on the fictional island, Isla Nublar, the second film also increases the amount of scenes off the island from three to eight as audiences had seen a T-Rex running around a jungle but obviously had been crying out for some San Diego obliteration.

As The Lost World continued box office success the third film was given the biggest budget yet and interestingly doesn’t outperform The Lost World on many stats. As that film had already covered urban, with a T-Rex running across San Diego, Jurassic Park III instead concerns itself with bringing new dinosaurs to the screen and on a different island.

In the previous films we had a total of 8 T-Rex spotting, whereas in this film there is only 1 due to its replacement as top dog by the Spinosaurus. With the return of archaeologist Dr. Grant there is interestingly an extra amount of awe given to the dinosaurs with an increase of 66% from the previous two films which would suggest the franchise returning to its roots with dinosaurs admired as much as they are feared.

The Jurassic Park franchise is consistently strong on action scenes and as the subject matter is surprisingly unique it will persist as one of the most memorable franchises for some time.