Jurassic Park (film)
Jurassic Park is a 1993 American science fiction action film[4] directed by Steven Spielberg, produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Gerald R. Molen, and starring Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, and Richard Attenborough. It is the first installment in the Jurassic Park franchise, and the first film in the original Jurassic Park trilogy, and is based on Michael Crichton's 1990 novel of the same name, with a screenplay by Crichton and David Koepp. The film is set on the fictional island of Isla Nublar, off Central America's Pacific Coast near Costa Rica, where a wealthy businessman John Hammond (Attenborough), and a team of genetic scientists have created a wildlife park of de-extinct dinosaurs. When industrial sabotage leads to a catastrophic shutdown of the park's power facilities and security precautions, a small group of visitors, including Hammond's grandchildren, struggle to survive and escape the now perilous island.
This article is about the original 1993 film. For the franchise, see Jurassic Park. For other uses, see Jurassic Park (disambiguation).Jurassic Park
Jurassic Park
by Michael Crichton
Universal Pictures
- June 9, 1993 (Uptown Theater)
- June 11, 1993 (United States)
127 minutes[1]
United States
English
$63 million[2]
$1.058 billion[3]
Before Crichton's novel was published, four studios put in bids for its film rights. With the backing of Universal Pictures, Spielberg acquired the rights for $1.5 million before its publication in 1990. Crichton was hired for an additional $500,000 to adapt the novel for the screen. Koepp wrote the final draft, which left out much of the novel's exposition and violence, while making numerous changes to the characters. Filming took place in California and Hawaii from August to November 1992, and post-production lasted until May 1993, supervised by Spielberg in Poland as he filmed Schindler's List. The dinosaurs were created with groundbreaking computer-generated imagery by Industrial Light & Magic, and with life-sized animatronic dinosaurs built by Stan Winston's team. To showcase the film's sound design, which included a mixture of various animal noises for the dinosaur sounds, Spielberg invested in the creation of DTS, a company specializing in digital surround sound formats. The film was backed by an extensive $65 million marketing campaign, which included licensing deals with over 100 companies.
Jurassic Park premiered on June 9, 1993, at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C., and was released on June 11 in the United States. It was a blockbuster hit and went on to gross over $914 million worldwide in its original theatrical run,[5] surpassing Spielberg's own E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial to become the highest-grossing film of all time until the release of Titanic in 1997.[6] The film was also a critical success, with praise directed at its special effects, sound design, action sequences, John Williams's score, and Spielberg's direction.[7] The film won over 20 awards, including three Academy Awards for technical achievements in visual effects and sound design. Following its 20th anniversary re-release in 2013, Jurassic Park became the oldest film in history to surpass $1 billion in ticket sales and the 17th overall.
Jurassic Park's pioneering use of computer-generated imagery is considered to have paved the way for the special effects practices of modern cinema. In 2018, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The film spawned a multimedia franchise that includes five sequels – The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), Jurassic Park III (2001), Jurassic World (2015), Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), and Jurassic World Dominion (2022) — a television series, video games, theme park attractions, comic books, and various merchandise.
Plot[edit]
Industrialist John Hammond has created Jurassic Park, a theme park of cloned dinosaurs, on the tropical island Isla Nublar, located off of the coast of Costa Rica. After a Velociraptor kills a dinosaur handler, the park's investors, represented by lawyer Donald Gennaro, demand a safety certification. Gennaro invites chaotician Ian Malcolm, and Hammond invites paleontologist Alan Grant and paleobotanist Ellie Sattler. Upon arrival, the group is shocked to see a live Brachiosaurus and other dinosaurs.
At the park's visitor center, the group learns that the cloning was accomplished by extracting dinosaur DNA from prehistoric mosquitoes preserved in amber. DNA from frogs, among other animals, was used to fill in gaps in the dinosaurs' genome. To prevent breeding, the dinosaurs were made female by direct chromosome manipulation. The group witnesses the hatching of a baby Velociraptor and visits the raptor enclosure. During lunch, the group debates the ethics of cloning and the park's creation. Malcolm warns of the implications of genetic engineering and scoffs at the park's design, saying it will inevitably break down.
Hammond's grandchildren, Lex and Tim, join the others for a tour of the park, while Hammond oversees them from the control room. Most of the dinosaurs fail to appear and the group encounters a sick Triceratops. The tour is cut short as a tropical storm approaches. The park employees leave for the mainland on a boat, while the visitors return to their railed-electric tour vehicles, except Sattler, who stays behind with the park's veterinarian, Dr. Harding, to study the sick Triceratops.
Jurassic Park's disgruntled lead computer programmer, Dennis Nedry, was previously bribed by Lewis Dodgson, a man working for Hammond's corporate rival, to steal frozen dinosaur embryos. He deactivates the park's security system to access the embryo storage room and stores them inside a container disguised as a Barbasol shaving cream can. Nedry's sabotage cuts power to the tour vehicles, stranding them as they near the park's Tyrannosaurus rex paddock. Most of the park's electric fences have also been deactivated, allowing the Tyrannosaurus to escape and attack the group. After the Tyrannosaurus overturns a tour vehicle, it injures Malcolm and devours Gennaro, while Grant, Lex, and Tim escape. On his way to deliver the embryos to the island's docks, Nedry gets lost in the rain, crashes his Jeep Wrangler, and is killed by a venom-spitting Dilophosaurus.
Sattler helps the game warden, Robert Muldoon, search for survivors; they find Malcolm just before the Tyrannosaurus returns and chases them away. Grant, Tim, and Lex take shelter in a treetop and encounter a Brachiosaurus herd. They discover the broken shells of dinosaur eggs the following morning. Grant concludes that the dinosaurs are breeding, which is possible because of amphibian DNA—animals like West African frogs can change their sex in a single-sex environment, enabling the dinosaurs to do so as well. The three later encounter a Gallimimus stampede.
Unable to decipher Nedry's code to reactivate the security system, Hammond and chief engineer Ray Arnold decide to reboot the park's systems. The group shuts down the park's power grid and retreat to an emergency bunker, while Arnold heads to a maintenance shed to complete the rebooting process. When he fails to return, Sattler and Muldoon head over, discovering the shutdown has released the Velociraptors. Muldoon distracts two of them while Sattler turns the power back on before being attacked by a third and discovering Arnold's severed arm. Muldoon, simultaneously, is caught off-guard and killed.
Grant, Tim, and Lex reach the visitor center. Grant heads out to look for Sattler, leaving Tim and Lex inside. The raptors appear and pursue Tim and Lex throughout a kitchen, but they escape, locking one in a freezer before joining Grant and Sattler. The group reaches the control room, and Lex restores the park's systems, allowing them to contact Hammond, who calls for help. As they try to leave, they are cornered by the two remaining raptors, but the Tyrannosaurus appears and kills them while the group flees. Hammond arrives in a jeep with Malcolm, and they board a helicopter to leave the island.
Marketing[edit]
Universal took the lengthy pre-production period to carefully plan the Jurassic Park marketing campaign.[57] It cost $65 million and included deals with 100 companies to market 1,000 products.[102] These included: three Jurassic Park video games by Sega and Ocean Software;[103] a toy line by Kenner distributed by Hasbro;[104] McDonald's "Dino-Sized meals";[57] and a novelization for young children.[105]
The film's trailers provided only a fleeting glimpse of the dinosaurs,[106] a tactic journalist Josh Horowitz described as "that old Spielberg axiom of never revealing too much" after Spielberg and director Michael Bay did the same for their production of Transformers in 2007.[107] The film was marketed with the tagline "An Adventure 65 Million Years in the Making". This was a joke Spielberg made on set about the genuine, thousands of years old mosquito in amber used for Hammond's walking stick.[108]
Release[edit]
Theatrical[edit]
Jurassic Park premiered at the Uptown Theater (Washington, D.C.) on June 9, 1993,[109][110] in support of two children's charities.[111] The film had previews on 1,412 screens starting at 9:30 pm EDT on Thursday, June 10, and officially opened on Friday in 2,404 theater locations and an estimated 3,400 screens.[112][113][114] Following the film's release, a traveling exhibition called "The Dinosaurs of Jurassic Park" began, showcasing dinosaur skeletons and film props.[115] The film began its international release on June 25, in Brazil before further openings in South America and then rolling out around most of the rest of the world from July 16 until October.[116] The United Kingdom premiere helped save the Lyric Theatre in Carmarthen, Wales from closure, an event chronicled in the 2022 film Save the Cinema.[117]
Reception[edit]
Box office[edit]
Jurassic Park became the highest-grossing film released worldwide up to that time, replacing Spielberg's own E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982).[151] It grossed $3.1 million from Thursday night screenings in the United States and Canada on June 10, and $50.1 million in its first weekend from 2,404 theaters, breaking the opening weekend record set by Batman Returns the year before.[113] The film would hold that record for two years until 1995 when Batman Forever took it.[152] Upon opening, it became the first film to generate $50 million in a single weekend.[153] By the end of its first week, Jurassic Park had grossed a record $81.7 million.[154] It grossed $100 million in a record nine days[155] and remained at number one for three weeks. It eventually grossed $357 million in the U.S. and Canada, ranking second of all-time behind E.T.[156][157] Box Office Mojo estimates the film sold over 86.2 million tickets in the US in its initial theatrical run.[158]
The film also did very well in international markets and was the first to gross $500 million overseas, surpassing the record $280 million overseas gross of E.T.[159][160] In its first international release date in Brazil, it also set an opening weekend record with a gross of $1,738,198 from 141 screens.[155] It went on to break further opening records around the world including in the United Kingdom, Japan, India, South Korea, Mexico, Germany, Australia, Taiwan, Italy, Denmark, South Africa and France.[161][162][163][164] In Japan, Jurassic Park grossed $8.4 million from 237 screens in two days (including previews).[161] In the United Kingdom, it also beat the opening weekend record set by Batman Returns with a gross of £4.875 million ($7.4 million) from 434 screens, including a record £443,000 from Thursday night previews, and also beat Terminator 2: Judgment Day's opening week record, with £9.2 million.[161][165][166][167] The film held the UK record until it was beaten by Independence Day in 1996.[168] After 12 days of grossing over £1 million a day, the film was the eighth highest-grossing film of all time in the UK[169] and after just three weeks, it became the highest-grossing, surpassing Ghost, eventually doubling the record with a gross of £47.9 million.[170][171] It spent a record eight consecutive weekends at the top of the UK box office.[172] Jurassic Park would remain as Europe's box office leader before being surpassed by Aladdin.[173] In Australia, the film had the widest release ever and was the first film to open with a one-day gross of more than A$1 million, grossing A$5,447,000 (US$3.6 million) in its first four days from 192 screens beating the opening record of Terminator 2 and also beating the weekly record set by The Bodyguard with a gross of A$6.8 million.[174][175][162] In the same weekend, it also set an opening record in Germany with a gross of DM 16.8 million ($10.5 million) from 644 screens.[162][174] In Italy, it also had the widest release ever in 344 theaters and grossed a record Lire 9.5 billion ($6.1 million).[163] After 115 days of release, it surpassed E.T. as the highest-grossing film worldwide of all time.[176] It eventually opened in France on October 20, 1993, and grossed a record 75 million F ($13 million) in its opening week from over 515 screens.[177][164] Its first week admissions in France of almost 2.3 million surpassed the previous record set by Rambo: First Blood Part II in 1985.[178]
The film set all-time records in, among others, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Japan (in US Dollars), Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Spain, Thailand and the United Kingdom.[116][179][180][160][181][182] Ultimately the film grossed $914 million worldwide in its initial release,[5] with Spielberg reportedly earning over $250 million from the film, the most a director or actor had earned from one film at the time.[183][116] Its record gross was surpassed in 1998 by Titanic, the first film to gross over $1 billion.[184]
The 3D re-release of Jurassic Park in April 2013 opened at fourth place at the US box office, with $18.6 million from 2,771 locations. IMAX showings accounted for over $6 million, with the 32 percent being the highest IMAX share ever for a nationwide release.[185] The international release had its most successful weekend in the last week of August, when it managed to climb to the top of the overseas box office with a $28.8 million debut in China.[186] The reissue earned $45.4 million in the United States and Canada and $44.5 million internationally as of August 2013,[187] leading to a lifetime gross of $402.5 million in the United States and Canada and $628.7 million overseas, for a worldwide gross of $1.029 billion, making Jurassic Park the 17th film to surpass the $1 billion mark.[188] It was the only Universal Pictures film to surpass the $1 billion mark until 2015, when the studio had three such films, Furious 7, Minions, and the fourth installment of the Jurassic Park franchise, Jurassic World.[189] The film earned an additional $374,238 in 2018 for its 25th anniversary re-release.[190] In June 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic closing most theaters worldwide and limiting what films played, Jurassic Park returned to 230 theaters (mostly drive-ins). It grossed $517,600, finishing in first for the fourth time in its history. It became the first time a re-issue topped the box office since The Lion King in September 2011.[191] It currently ranks as the 37th highest-grossing film of all time in the U.S. and Canada (not adjusted for inflation) and the 44th highest-grossing film of all time.[2]
Critical response[edit]
Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes retrospectively reported an approval rating of 92% based on 142 reviews, with an average rating of 8.50/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "Jurassic Park is a spectacle of special effects and lifelike animatronics, with some of Spielberg's best sequences of sustained awe and sheer terror since Jaws".[192] Metacritic gave the film a weighted average score of 68 out of 100, based on reviews from 20 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[193] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.[194]
Janet Maslin of The New York Times called it "a true movie milestone, presenting awe- and fear-inspiring sights never before seen on the screen [...] On paper, this story is tailor-made for Mr. Spielberg's talents [but] [i]t becomes less crisp on screen than it was on the page, with much of the enjoyable jargon either mumbled confusingly or otherwise thrown away".[195] In Rolling Stone, Peter Travers called the film "colossal entertainment—the eye-popping, mind-bending, kick-out-the-jams thrill ride of summer and probably the year [...] Compared with the dinos, the characters are dry bones, indeed. Crichton and co-screenwriter David Koepp have flattened them into nonentities on the trip from page to screen".[196] Roger Ebert gave the film three stars out of four: "The movie delivers all too well on its promise to show us dinosaurs. We see them early and often, and they are indeed a triumph of special effects artistry, but the movie is lacking other qualities that it needs even more, such as a sense of awe and wonderment, and strong human story values".[197] Henry Sheehan of Sight & Sound argued: "The complaints over Jurassic Park's lack of story and character sound a little off the point", pointing out the story arc of Grant learning to protect Hammond's grandchildren despite his initial dislike of them.[30] Empire magazine gave the film five stars, calling it "quite simply one of the greatest blockbusters of all time".[198]
Accolades[edit]
In March 1994, Jurassic Park won all three Academy Awards for which it was nominated: Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Visual Effects (at the same ceremony, Spielberg, editor Michael Kahn, and composer John Williams won Academy Awards for Schindler's List).[199] The film won honors outside the U.S. including the 1994 BAFTA for Best Special Effects, as well as the Award for the Public's Favorite Film.[200] It won the 1994 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation,[201] and the 1993 Saturn Awards for Best Science Fiction Film, Best Direction, Best Writing for Crichton and Koepp and Best Special Effects.[202] The film won the 1993 People's Choice Awards for Favorite All-Around Motion Picture.[203] Young Artist Awards were given to Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello, with the film winning an Outstanding Action/Adventure Family Motion Picture award.[204] In 2001, the American Film Institute ranked Jurassic Park as the 35th most thrilling film of American cinema.[205] The film is included in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die,[206] film lists by Empire magazine,[207] and The Guardian.[208]