By now, it’s a familiar pattern: A new Jurassic Park franchise movie movie comes out during the summer, garnering middling and sometimes exhausted-sounding reviews. Yes, it has some decent special effects and maybe a fun set piece or two, but it’s not a patch on Steven Spielberg’s 1993 original. Terms like “out of ideas,” “incurious,” and “shell of its former self” have been thrown around to describe the latest iteration, Jurassic World Rebirth. It’s possible, though, that fans who loved Jurassic Park and have grumbled through most of the sequels don’t know how good they have it.
Not everyone is grumbling, of course. The three previous Jurassic World movies each made more than a billion dollars worldwide, and Rebirth is doing just fine in early sales, though it did garner a less-than-glowing “B” CinemaScore from opening night audiences. (CinemaScore is even less scientific than Rotten Tomatoes in determining a consensus, but a “B,” which would be a solid thumbs-up from a critic, is considered more of a “meh.”)
But there is a generational divide that might explain why Jurassic sequels engender so much vocal disappointment while also endlessly continuing forward. While this is a broad generalization, people born after 1980 or so tend to revere Jurassic Park as one of the defining visual-effects thrillers, creature features, and all-around spectacular-adventure triumphs of their movie-watching lives. Those born earlier — Boomers and Gen-Xers, in other words, compared to the post-1980 millennials — often prefer another Spielberg feature, one that just turned 50: Jaws, which has its own set of grumble-inducing sequels, some bordering on unwatchable.
Image: Universal Pictures
A whole lot of audience members and critics in 2025 fall on the Jurassic Park side of that line, enough that it’s easy to forget how Jurassic Park’s original reviews were more good than great. Here’s Jack Mathews from Newsday: “A theme park of a movie with a theme park setting, designed for summer tourists who like their thrills visceral. We watch the actors as if we were all on the same Universal Studios tour tram, aware at all times that we’re reacting to engineered illusions.”
Mike Clark of USA Today specifically invoked Jaws in considering Jurassic Park on first release: “On a ‘people’ level, Park isn’t Jaws, but on a jolt level — oh, yes, it is.” And none other than Roger Ebert was even less enthusiastic, complaining that in Jaws, Spielberg had the sense to prioritize anticipation over effects: “The movie delivers all too well on its promise to show us dinosaurs. We see them early and often, and they are indeed a triumph of special effects artistry, but the movie is lacking other qualities that it needs even more, such as a sense of awe and wonderment, and strong human story values.” (Ebert’s original review of Jaws, meanwhile, called it “one hell of a good story, brilliantly told,” praising characters “that have been developed into human beings we get to know and care about.”)
These critics were all born well before 1980 — there were very few 13-year-olds professionally reviewing movies in 1993. It’s not that an appreciation of Jurassic Park requires a blush of barely adolescent excitement and lingering childhood dino-mania; plenty of today’s most prominent adult critics would surely judge the first Jurassic Park much more favorably than their 1993 equivalents, even without childhood nostalgia for it. These days, Jurassic Park’s reputation doesn’t lag so far behind Jaws.
Both movies’ reputations have grown over the years, with multiple re-releases and anniversary appreciations. The sheer level of enduring Spielberg craft makes both movies rewatchable classics. But it’s fair to say that Jurassic Park had further to go to catch up with its sibling, likely because it did skew younger from the start. It’s also particularly attuned to both the huckster-y spectacle of the blockbuster era and the real-world scientific breakthroughs that followed. “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should” may resonate a bit more with current and future generations than “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
Image: Universal Pictures
That Jurassic line about scientists has also been repeatedly invoked as a pithy dismissal of the movie’s sequels. It’s a reductive use of a great line, but it does help sum up the feeling that the six subsequent Jurassic movies are more obligatory than inspired. As someone born right on that Xennial line of 1980, though, I’ve never felt especially betrayed by the idea of a Jurassic movie that’s just OK. Jaws strikes me as substantially better than Jurassic Park: smarter and richer in characterization, a pure-cinema exercise less reliant on visual effects than some of Spielberg’s movies, and with a depiction of America that makes it feel like the definitive Fourth of July holiday movie. Those qualities make its sequels feel like a massive comedown, barely worth mentioning. Every one of them is vastly worse than anything the Jurassic franchise has to offer.
That’s faint praise, so let me more actively defend the latter. The Jurassic movies aren’t all created equal, to be sure; Colin Trevorrow’s franchise-reviving 2015 smash Jurassic World feels particularly dyspeptic in retrospect, full of sour gender politics and standoffish characters who never really warm up. But for fans of monster movies, the sequels have plenty to offer, provided you can accept that they play a bit like big-budget versions of the later-period Universal Monster movies from the 1940s.
No one would argue that The Invisible Man’s Revenge or House of Dracula are as good as the original films that spawned them, but if you like movies about werewolves, vampires, and madmen who can turn invisible, those sequels are fun indulgences — just like watching different groups of dinos attack people in different places. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the best of the recent Jurassic World trilogy, makes that connection more explicit by staging its final stretch in a large but creaky mansion, with dinosaurs set loose on a dark and stormy night.
The new Jurassic World Rebirth is more traditionalist, but it’s not just a Jurassic Park remake. It shares adventure-movie elements with the 1933 King Kong, and while it struggles to find anything to say that’s as resonant as that movie (or the original Jurassic Park), it’s still a good-looking creature feature that should appeal to monster-loving kids and adults. Having Gareth Edwards behind the camera helps, just as it helped to have Spielberg himself working on the first Jurassic Park sequel back in 1997. Spielberg is such a master of camera movement, blocking, and image-making that simply having him work through a few big set pieces — most notably, an extended sequence featuring two T. rexes, a trailer, and a cliff — places 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park well above most summer blockbusters in terms of pure craft. Its San Diego-set finale (much like the Malta sequence from Jurassic World Dominion) adds some welcome Godzilla notes to the series’ repertoire.
Image: Universal Pictures
Spielberg stayed on as a Jurassic producer after Lost World, but the Jaws sequels had no such consistent guiding hand: Spielberg ultimately kept his name away from them. (In a 2011 interview, he admitted to not being happy with how Jaws 2 turned out, and said he thinks about making a Jaws sequel from time to time, before dissuading himself.) The three Jaws follow-ups to have some of that aforementioned Universal-monster DNA, but while we’ve seen Jurassic movies explore theme parks gone haywire, old-fashioned jungle adventures, and Godzilla-style city destruction, with rotating line-ups of creatures, the shark’s variations are mainly limited to “bigger” and “inexplicably able to very quickly swim thousands of miles for purposes of revenge.”
Those sequels also bear unflattering resemblances to the low-rent slasher movies of their era, only without nearly as many cool kills. The second movie, for example, has Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) from the original film saving a bunch of stranded teens, while the second follows Brody’s son. These movies drifting toward sort of beach-party/slasher hybrids made it increasingly easy for adult audiences to shrug them off entirely.
In the 1980s, though, abandoning a hit movie’s sequels to become youth-audience cash-ins wasn’t so unusual. Though Jaws jumpstarted the summer movie season as we know it, the idea of sequels as major events continued to lag behind. It was a different era of sequels; follow-ups were expected to make about two-thirds as much money as a series-launcher, if that. Movies as lofty as the Best Picture winners The Sting and The French Connection spawned cheaper or just plain forgotten sequels in the ’70s, while in the ’80s, studios churned out new installments in successful slasher series (and new Police Academy movies) as quickly as possible. Jaws 2 did set an opening weekend record back in 1978, but the competition it narrowly beat, Grease, wound up making way more in the long run. Jaws 3D notched the second-biggest opening weekend of 1983, behind only Return of the Jedi — but its final numbers were only good for 15th place at the end of the year.
Jaws is also one of the few blockbusters that has never been subjected to some form of legacy sequel, reboot, or remake, consigning the sequels to the realm of trivia. They’re now arguably better known for their taglines (including “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water” and “This time, it’s personal”) than for their actual stories or stars. Viewers growing into a love of movies during the 1990s would not have caught them on TV as often as kids growing up a decade earlier.
The Jurassic series, on the other hand, has been opening new sequels on thousands of screens at a regular cadence for the past decade, presumably keeping kids interested and millennials vaguely annoyed. This doesn’t strike me as a betrayal of the original movie’s values. While none of the followers are as expertly engineered as the first film, the original Jurassic Park winks at its own theme-park aesthetics as much as it delivers a trenchant commentary on commercialization. The film’s famous pan across the park’s merchandise shelves is equally affectionate and sardonic; Spielberg isn’t exactly biting the hand that feeds.
Image: Universal Pictures
The Jurassic Park sequels have also managed to chart American society’s shifting relationship with sensational levels of movie spectacle, which increasingly occupies the center of many moviegoers’ attention. Though some have described Jurassic World Rebirth’s new status quo, where the viewing public isn’t all that impressed by dinosaurs anymore, as a depressing fulfillment of prophecy (and maybe an admission of defeat), that plot beat reads more like a sly depiction of blockbuster-era ennui, where audiences often seem “over” this or that style of movie or franchise, without feeling sure about what might satisfy them instead.
The generation that grew up favoring Jurassic Park over Jaws and considering it a top-three Spielberg movie has been repeatedly enticed by new sequels: Viewers keep heading to theaters, hoping to recreate that initial rush of excitement. Jurassic Park arrived at a revolutionary time for visual effects, and even more so than Jaws, it fed into the idea that a big-budget summer thrill machine beloved by third graders can also be a great movie. It seems unlikely that many viewers had similarly high expectations for Jaws 3D.
Jurassic Park wasn’t the only movie to boost expectations for visual-effects blockbusters in general, as well as for its own potential follow-ups. But true to Spielberg’s skill set, it may have done so more efficiently than any other film since Star Wars. By elevating the excellent original Jurassic Park to Jaws levels of admiration, the movie’s most ardent devotees may have convinced themselves to keep looking for similarly high quality in what is ultimately a series of diverting monster movies.
I’m not arguing for excusing franchise slop by keeping expectations basement-level; just for seeing Jurassic Park movies in the proper context of shlocky, if sometimes fun, sequels. (And if that’s shudder-inducing, for skipping them accordingly.) The Jaws sequels are lousy, but they left the pre-Jurassic Park generation with a better understanding of what dangers to expect when you keep going back into the water.
