Jurassic World Rebirth Pits Paleontology Against Prehistoric Monsters

Universal Pictures dropped the final trailer for Jurassic World Rebirth on Friday. It gives the latest dinosaur action flick one last promotional push before it slams into theaters over the Fourth of July holiday weekend. The film will open on July 2, 2025, and stars Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali. It’s also returning to the site of the first Jurassic Park in what’s being billed as a new beginning for the franchise. The story will also bring together an unlikely team of scientists, mercenaries, and a shipwrecked family in the same isolated dinosaur island hotspot.

Jurassic World Rebirth is the fourth film in the Jurassic World series and the seventh Jurassic Park franchise movie. The franchise started with the 1993 Steven Spielberg-directed blockbuster and came back to life in 2015 with Colin Trevorrow’s reboot Jurassic World. Rebirth is being directed by Gareth Edwards, who also helmed Godzilla in 2014. The screenplay is by David Koepp, who is back after working on the first Jurassic Park and its sequel, The Lost World (1997).

Per the official synopsis, Jurassic World Rebirth is set five years after the end of Jurassic World Dominion. Dinosaurs have become extinct on a global scale. Most of them have died off or been destroyed as their ideal environment (high humidity and temperature close to what they were originally adapted to) is nearly impossible to find in the modern ecosystem. As a result, the few dinosaur populations that still exist on Earth have been herded into heavily-regulated, isolated equatorial zones that most closely replicate the dinosaurs’ original climate. Three dinosaurs, one from each domain (land, sea, and air), reside in one of these tropical biospheres. Each has genetic data crucial to developing a revolutionary, life-saving drug.

Scarlett Johansson will play Zora Bennett, a professional in clandestine operations who’s been recruited to lead an extraction team on a top-secret mission to secure the genetic data. In the trailer, the extraction mission intersects with a group of civilians out on a family boat ride. A marine dinosaur attacks the boat, wounding and killing many on board. The survivors end up stranded on a remote island that used to be a secret Jurassic Park research station. We also see in the trailer that the island’s past is likely more sinister and more dangerous than its remaining dinosaurs.

Jurassic World Rebirth will have a well-known cast of familiar faces. Along with Johansson and Ali, the film will also star Rupert Friend as Martin Krebs, a pharmaceutical company representative with dubious motives; Jonathan Bailey as paleontologist Henry Loomis; and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as Reuben Delgado, the head of a family of survivors whose boat gets attacked and sunk by a marine dinosaur. Luna Blaise, David Iacano, and Audrina Miranda play Reuben’s children. Bechir Sylvain is part of the extraction team. Ed Skrein and Philippine Velge are also attached in unspecified roles.

A lot of the trailer is recycled from a first trailer that was released last February, so if you saw that, a lot of the video will look familiar. The same holds for some of the shots of dinosaurs and cast members. The new trailer starts in a lab as a worker in a hazmat suit is trapped inside a containment chamber with a T Rex. He screams for help, but it’s too late for him. The trailer is on brand with most of the earlier footage of the film in terms of visual spectacle. It’s also still very much focused on high-stakes action, some cheesy dialogue, and monster-sized dinosaur carnage.

The trailer also shows one of the film’s major set pieces. It’s an attempted robbery of a pterosaur egg that we can only assume is Quetzalcoatlus northropi, which, as one character quips, is “a flying carnivore the size of an F-16.” We also get glimpses of the classic raptors and a new dinosaur predator in the film, the mosasaur. In the trailer, a character also says that the island used to house “the worst of the worst”—dinosaurs that were either too aggressive, hostile, or problematic to stay in their biospheres.

Jurassic World Rebirth has been described as a fresh start to the Jurassic World series, though, as with most reboots or new chapters in a franchise, it’s leaning pretty heavily on fan nostalgia while still pushing the action-movie button on its own. Returning to the original Jurassic Park research island is a clear play at nostalgia. New dinosaurs, mysteries, and locations should offer unpredictability even for die-hard fans. As to whether or not this new chapter will reset the series, time will tell, but there are some familiar ingredients: an A-team of specialists, mind-bending science in moral gray areas, and world-ending dinosaur destruction.

The trailer has several big action set pieces and narrow escapes. There are scenes of characters dashing through jungles, hiding in sunken shipwrecks, and outsmarting dinosaurs in their prehistoric environment. Johansson, in particular, seems to bring a grittier, more tactical edge to the typical dinosaur-survival narrative.

Jurassic World Rebirth will open nationwide in theaters on July 2, 2025.