Over thirty years ago now, on June 18, 2025, one of the biggest and most important films ever made was released, whenSteven Spielberg’sJurassic Parkcame to theaters. The man who had already given us sharks inJaws, and aliens inClose Encounters of the Third KindandE.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, was now going to tackle dinosaurs running amok in an amusement park. It’s safe to say, with itsalmost billion-dollar worldwide box office haul, thatJurassic Parkwas 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 withJawsbutDuel, and the importance of characters, but hisIndiana Jonestrilogy showed how well he could construct non-stop action.Jurassic Parkhas all of that. Yes, there are dinosaurs killing people and intense chase scenes, but none of that would matter without the phenomenal characters played bySam Neill,Laura Dern,Jeff Goldblum, andRichard Attenborough, among others.
Spielberg and Universal Pictures won the bidding war to make a feature film out of Michael Crichton’s novelof the same name, and while we can be thankful for that, a fewother big names likeTim Burton,Richard Donner, andJoe Danteput in bids too. Another director who came close to acquiring the rights toJurassic ParkwasJames 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 whoturnedGremlinsinto a family film, and it was he whohelped getBack to the Futureoff the ground. Spielberg is a master of knowing how to take an interesting idea and shape it into cinema gold. Take the aforementionedGremlins, for example. The originalChris Columbusscript was an R-rated 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 forJurassic Park. Michael Crichton’s novel, while a great one,has some differences from the film. Most notable is that it dared tokill 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 usa 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 seewhat the likes of Tim Burton, Richard Donner, and Joe Dante would have done withJurassic Parkhad they won the rights to it over Steven Spielberg. In aninterview 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 asJurassic Parkas well. In a 2012 interview with theUK’s Huffington Post, James Cameronspoke 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 imagineJurassic Parkwithout Steven Spielberg, 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 likeThe Terminator,Aliens,Terminator 2: Judgment Day,Titanic, and theAvatarfilms, but he is also afilmmaker equally as loved by audiences.Titanicand the twoAvatarsare 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 workof practical effects genius and the CGI mastery ofGeorge Lucas' Industrial Lights & Magic. Thatexact same team worked with Camerona few years beforeTerminator 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 2isn’t a success without the father-son chemistry betweenArnold SchwarzeneggerandEdward Furlong.True Liesis just another action movie (though an impressive-looking one), without the interplay between Schwarzenegger andJamie Lee Curtis.Titanicis a sinking ship and nothing more withoutLeonardo DiCaprio’s Jack andKate Winslett’s Rose to care for. Then there’sAliens.Ridley Scottmade that first classicAlienwithSigourney 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. An R-ratedJurassic Parkmay 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.
