It would have been pretty bonkers to see velociraptors wielding guns and going into battle for crazy, evil mega-corporation InGen in director J.A. Bayona’s Jurassic World 2, but producer Colin Trevorrow shot down that idea pretty quickly.
Trevorrow was a guest on the Jurassic Outpost podcast and had this to say about raptors packing heat:
I’m not that interested in militarized dinosaurs, at least not in practice. I liked it in theory as the pipe dream of a lunatic. When that idea was first presented to me as part of an earlier script it was something that the character that ended up being Owen was for, that he supported, something that he was actively doing even at the beginning. Derek and I, one of our first reactions was, ‘No if anyone’s gonna militarize raptors that’s what the bad guy does, he’s insane.’
In Jurassic World — which Trevorrow directed — actor Vincent D’Onofrio’s bad guy Vic Hoskins, who was InGen’s head security operations, was obsessed with turning the park’s prehistoric zoo attractions into battle-ready commandos. When he became raptor lunch towards the end of World, it looks like the idea of a dino-army went with him.
On the podcast, Trevorrow referred to an early draft of what became Jurassic World that gained infamy among Jurassic fans for its depiction of fully-functioning militarized dinos. Apparently, the character of Owen Grady (who was eventually played by Chris Pratt in the final movie) was an ex-military dude that was all for training a platoon of raptors.
Thankfully, Trevorrow and screenwriter Derek Connolly recognized that insane idea for what it was and gave that characteristic to the appropriately insane bad guy instead. So don’t expect any war scenes of army grunts duking it out with an assault rifle-carrying stegosaurus in Jurassic World 2.
If that bums you out, look on the bright side: Trevorrow also mentioned on the podcast that Bayona’s soft reboot sequel will do away with the overabundance of CGI that plagued World and go back to Steven Spielberg’s original’s proclivity for animatronics.
Trevorrow told Jurassic Outpost:
There will be animatronics for sure. We’ll follow the same general rule as all of the films in the franchise, which is the animatronic dinosaurs are best used when standing still or moving at the hips or the neck. They can’t run or perform complex physical actions, and anything beyond that you go to animation. The same rules applied in ‘Jurassic Park.’ I think the lack of animatronics in ‘Jurassic World’ had more to do with the physicality of the Indominus, the way the animal moved. It was very fast and fluid, it ran a lot, and needed to move its arms and legs and neck and tail all at once. It wasn’t a lumbering creature.
Jurassic World 2 is scheduled to hit theaters — sans pterodactyl troopers — on June 22, 2018.
