2018 marks the 25th anniversary of Steven Spielberg’s smash hit dinosaur movie, Jurassic Park. But what if we told you the mega-budget family flick almost never came to be after a bidding war erupted for the rights to translate the Michael Crichton novel, and it was almost won by James Cameron?!
Cameron, who is currently working on the sequel/sequels to the Avatar movie, said in an interview with The Huffington Post that he was interested in acquiring the rights to the story in the early nineties, but was beaten to the punch at the very last minute by Jaws director Steven Spielberg.
Cameron would go on to describe his vision for the Jurassic Park movie as being like his 1986 sci-fi action horror sequel Aliens, but with dinosaurs in place of the Xenomorphs.
“When I saw the film, I realized that I was not the right person to make the film, he was. Because he made a dinosaur movie for kids, and mine would have been Aliens with dinosaurs, and that wouldn’t have been fair. Dinosaurs are for 8-year-olds. We can all enjoy it, too, but kids get dinosaurs and they should not have been excluded for that. His sensibility was right for that film, I’d have gone further, nastier, much nastier.”
By the sound of it, Cameron had plans to make something far gorier than the Spielberg effort, which isn’t to say Spielberg’s movie didn’t have it’s share of violence, albeit more implied than actually shown on camera. As cool as Cameron’s vision sounds, we’re pretty confident it wouldn’t have inspired the number of sequels the actual version did, as it perhaps wouldn’t have had quite as long a shelf life as Spielberg’s merchandising machine.
It’s not all doom and gloom for James Cameron, though. In missing out on Jurassic Park he would end up making the highest grossing movie of all time, Titanic, before surpassing this with his own aforementioned Avatar opus.
The fifth film in the series, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, stomps into cinemas this summer.
What do you think? Would you like to have seen a James Cameron directed Jurassic Park? Do you think the Jurassic Park movies would be improved with more gore and violence? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
How about comparing BOTH movies to the 1954 film THEM? Many parallels exist….even a young female sole survivor who can’t speak of the horror she experienced. The tunnels to destroy the queen’s nest by the military.