The Downfall Of The Jurassic World Franchise Can Be Traced Back To One Moment

This article contains spoilers for "Jurassic World Rebirth."

The "Jurassic" franchise is in a dire place — creatively, of course, because financially, the franchise continues to virtually print money. Sure, Gareth Edwards' "Jurassic World: Rebirth" is better than the travesty that was "Dominion," because it's at least an often-fun adventure with dinosaurs. But it's also, as /Film's Jeremy Smith deftly pointed out, a "cry for help from a series that's run out of ideas."

The movie is a back-to-basics story wherein a group of mercenaries are hired to head to yet another secret island full of dinosaurs (this time an island with some ugly mutant dinosaurs) in order to extract samples for a Big Pharma guy.

Part of the problem with the movie is that it continues a rather ludicrous idea from the "Jurassic World" trilogy — that people somehow would grow bored of dinosaurs. This started with the first "Jurassic World" as an excuse to bring in more extreme dinosaurs, asking audiences to somehow believe that videos of baby triceratops wouldn't become the next phenomenon on social media, akin to cat videos. Then, "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" made things worse by bringing dinosaurs back to the mainland, an idea the franchise was not interested in properly exploring.

Really, the downfall of the "Jurassic World" franchise (as in, everything that's happened after the first three movies) can be traced to one moment: When the little clone girl lets the dinosaurs loose rather than letting them die.

The scene takes place right at the end of "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom." At this point, Isla Nublar had been destroyed thanks to a volcanic eruption, and the remaining dinosaurs had been smuggled to a big gothic manor where they were about to be killed off by poisonous gas. At the last second, Charlotte Lockwood (Isabella Sermon) decides to let all the dinosaurs out rather than seeing them die. Her reasoning? She sees herself in the creatures, because she is actually a human clone — a bonkers idea that the franchise never really touched on again in a significant way.

More than anything else, and nearly as bad an idea as everything involving Chris Pratt in that trilogy, letting the dinosaurs loose on the mainland is the moment the "Jurassic World" movies painted themselves into a corner and died creatively. Simply put, the franchise had few places to go once that decision was made. You either double down and have dinosaurs radically change society in a "Planet of the Apes" type of scenario, or you simply ignore it all.

Unfortunately, "Jurassic World: Dominion," amid its many, many, many flaws, decided to kinda do both and neither. Sure, it had that scene in Malta where raptors chased after Chris Pratt through the streets, but the franchise never actually featured full-on dinosaur city chaos. Instead, "Dominion" pivoted to yet another story about a secret dinosaur compound in a secluded location, and "Jurassic World Rebirth" doubled down on it by moving the action back to a different island entirely.

"Jurassic World Rebirth" makes things even worse by killing off practically every dinosaur that is not living near the equator. The film took the boldest and biggest idea introduced in the "Jurassic World" trilogy and threw it out the window, apparently deciding there wasn't much that could be done with it without taking the franchise in a direction they weren't comfortable taking it.

That's the coward's way out. Rather than take it all back, the "Jurassic World" movies should have doubled down. Why not go the "Planet of the Apes" route and have dinosaurs take over the planet again? Or, since those movies focused so much on humans wanting to weaponize dinosaurs, just go full "Dino-Riders" and do dinosaurs with machine guns and laser beams mounted on top of them. There is still time to save this franchise, Universal, and with no clear sequel idea teed up at the end of "Rebirth," there's an opportunity coming to correct this mistake.