T-Rex Almost Didn’t Survive Jurassic Park

It’s almost impossible to imagine ‘Jurassic Park,’ or any of its three sequels, without one key figure: the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

However, had director Steven Spielberg not had an eleventh-hour change of heart, things could have been very different - as the T-Rex was originally meant to die midway through the 1993 classic.

Producer Kathleen Kennedy - currently doing the promotional rounds for her latest feature, a low-key little film called ‘Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens’ - revealed in The Nerdist podcast (quotes via Games Radar) just how close they came to killing off what proved to be ‘Jurassic Park’s greatest icon:

“I was sitting by the monitor one time with Steven on ‘Jurassic’ and about halfway through the movie we killed the T. Rex. He was sitting there and he goes, ‘Guys, guys come here—we can’t kill the T. Rex!'

"He had been watching the movie in his head as we’re shooting, and we’re halfway through the process and we’re nearing the moment where we’re gonna shoot the scene where we kill the T. Rex and he’s like, 'No, the T. Rex is the star of the movie. We can’t kill him.’

"So we called the production designer Rick Carter over and we, literally right by the monitor, started to talk about how we were going to change the next scene and the entire end of the film as we were making it, so that we could keep our leading actor, the T. Rex, alive.”

Exactly how the mighty king of the dinosaurs was going to meet his end is not divulged, but as anyone who’s seen the movie knows - and really, is there anyone who hasn’t seen ‘Jurassic Park?’ - the film’s ending would have been rather different had T-Rex not been to (inadvertently) save the day.

T-Rex went on to be the star of the show in ‘The Lost World: Jurassic Park’s San Diego finale, before controversially being beaten in a fight by the Spinosaurus in ‘Jurassic Park III.’

And of course, this year’s ‘Jurassic World’ would surely have turned out rather differently, had Bryce Dallas Howard’s Clare not been able to open Paddock 9…

It’s fair to assume we’ll be seeing the T-Rex once again alongside Howard and Chris Pratt in the as-yet untitled fifth ‘Jurassic’ movie, scheduled for June 2018.

Picture Credit: Universal

Read More:
What Will Jurassic World 2 Be About?
The Jurassic Park TV Show That Never Was
Jurassic World Toy ‘Most Dangerous of 2015′