Over thirty years ago now, on June 11, 1993, one of the biggest and most important films ever made was released, when Steven Spielberg‘s Jurassic Park came to theaters. The man who had already given us sharks in Jaws, and aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, was now going to tackle dinosaurs run amok in an amusement park. It’s safe to say, with its almost billion-dollar worldwide box office haul, that Jurassic Park was a success. Though it launched a six-film franchise, no entry has yet to come close to the original. Steven Spielberg was the perfect director for the job. He understood horror, not just with Jaws but Duel, and the importance of characters, but his Indiana Jones trilogy showed how well he could construct non-stop action. Jurassic Park has all of that. Yes, there are dinsosaurs killing people and intense chase scenes, but none of that would matter without the phenomenal characters played by Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, and Richard Attenborough, among others.
Spielberg and Universal Pictures won the bidding war to make a feature film out of Michael Crichton’s novel of the same name, and while we can be thankful for that, a few other big names like Tim Burton, Richard Donner, and Joe Dante put in bids too. Another director who came close to acquiring the rights to Jurassic Park was James Cameron. He once said that if he had made it, the film would have been much darker.
Jurassic Park
In Steven Spielberg’s massive blockbuster, paleontologists Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) are among a select group chosen to tour an island theme park populated by dinosaurs created from prehistoric DNA. While the park’s mastermind, billionaire John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), assures everyone that the facility is safe, they find out otherwise when various ferocious predators break free and go on the hunt.
Steven Spielberg’s ‘Jurassic Park’ Is One of the Most Successful Films Ever Made
As great as he still is now, it’s almost impossible to put into words just how big Steven Spielberg was in the ’70s and throughout the ’90s. He not only directed some of the biggest movies ever put to film but had a hand in other classics as an executive producer as well. Spielberg is the one who turned Gremlins into a family film, and it was he who helped get Back to the Future off the ground. Spielberg is a master of knowing how to take an interesting idea and shape it into cinema gold. Take the aforementioned Gremlins, for example. The original Chris Columbus script was a hard-R horror film with an evil Gizmo. While that may have been interesting, Spielberg’s assertion that it needed to be toned down and with Gizmo as the hero was the right move. He knew that you could be scary, but still hold back just a bit to make the film more accessible for all audiences.
The same goes for Jurassic Park. Michael Crichton’s novel, while a great one, has some differences from the film. Most notable is that it dared to kill off Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm character, and it made the creator of Jurassic Park, Richard Attenborough’s John Hammond, a villain. Spielberg recognized that you couldn’t kill off the film’s most popular character and still leave audiences satisfied when the end credits roll. He also saw past a shallow villain and found the intrigue of showing us a good man whose bad idea cost him everything. While the dinosaurs are thrilling and scary, it’s these characters that keep us coming back.
James Cameron Says He Tried To Get the Rights to ‘Jurassic Park’
It would have been interesting to see what the likes of Tim Burton, Richard Donner, and Joe Dante would have done with Jurassic Park had they won the rights to it over Steven Spielberg. In an interview with the A.V. Club, Dante once said that he didn’t like Spielberg’s decision to change John Hammond from a bad guy to a good one.
As talented and influential as these directors are, another even bigger name wanted his shot as Jurassic Park as well. In a 2012 interview with the UK’s Huffington Post, James Cameron spoke of his desire to acquire the rights to Crichton’s novel but revealed that Steven Spielberg beat him by a few hours. He said:
“But when I saw the film, I realised 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.”
What Would a James Cameron-Directed ‘Jurassic Park’ Have Looked Like?
While it’s impossible to imagine Jurassic Park in any form from what it exists as it’s still fun to fantasize about what James Cameron would have done with it. If any director was as capable of handling a project this big, it’s Cameron. Not only did he make big-budget, effects-heavy movies like The Terminator, Aliens, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Titanic, and the Avatar films, but he is also a filmmaker equally as loved by audiences. Titanic and the two Avatars are three of the top four biggest moneymakers ever made, after all.
Spielberg knocked it out of the (Jurassic) park with the film’s effects. Dinosaur movies in the past had looked pretty cheesy. The bad effects, the stop-motion, or in Godzilla’s case, the guys in cheap rubber suits, could take an audience out of a movie. Spielberg made the dinosaurs feel alive. All these decades later, it still holds up, thanks to the combined work of practical effects genius and the CGI mastery of George Lucas‘ Industrial Lights & Magic. That exact same team worked with Cameron a few years before Terminator 2. Cameron later made a sinking ship look real and made us believe in a world of blue humanoids. He could’ve done what Spielberg did, no problem.
James Cameron could have also matched Spielberg in character building. Terminator 2 isn’t a success without the father-son chemistry between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Edward Furlong. True Lies is just another action movie (though an impressive-looking one), without the interplay between Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis. Titantic is a sinking ship and nothing more without Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Jack and Kate Winslett‘s Rose to care for. Then there’s Aliens. Ridley Scott made that first classic Alien with Sigourney Weaver, and when Weaver returned for a sequel, Cameron just didn’t up the ante with more aliens, but he also surrounded Weaver with more characters to get behind, including a mother-like angle. A hard-R Jurassic Park may have worked. There could have been more dinosaurs ripping everyone to shreds, heroes included, until only one remained, but it didn’t need to go farther and nastier like Cameron envisioned. Steven Spielberg has always known to hold back even when going farther is an option. He made magic for not just eight-year-olds, but the kids inside us all.
Jurassic Park is available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.
