Abandoned Jurassic Park 4 Concept Art Is Chock-Full Of Crazy
This could have been a glorious train wreck.
This article is more than 2 years old
Jurassic Park 4 has been bouncing back and forth between active development and development hell for years now, but producer Kathleen Kennedy recently reassured fans that it is indeed in the works. Hopefully it will be worth the wait and we’ll get a genuinely worthy Jurassic Park sequel a few years down the line. But we almost — almost — got a Jurassic Park sequel that was full of things like this.
Yeah, that is indeed some sort of freaky dinosaur hybrid critter. That shot and the others below were posted to the forums at NeoGaf and are supposedly unused concept art by Carlos Huante and models by ILM, all of which were created for a version of Jurassic Park 4 that never happened.
If you’ve been following Jurassic Park 4 rumors over the years, you might remember a 2007 script synopsis posted to Ain’t It Cool News. Supposedly written by John Sayles and Bill Monahan, the script sounded like something JP creator Michael Cricthon might have dreamed up while on lots and lots and lots of LSD.
According to that synopsis, Jurassic Park 4 was going to focus on a mercenary named Nick Harris, who is hired to return to Isla Nubar and recover the fake shaving-cream can containing dino embryos that the sleazy Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight) was trying to smuggle out before becoming dino chow. See, in the Jurassic Park universe the U.N. is trying to contain and exterminate all the dinos loosed on the world by Hammond, so they’ve made the breeding of dinosaurs illegal and have also restricted the mining of amber, since that’s where Hammond got his dino DNA in the first one.
While on the island, Harris runs into a team of mysterious soldiers who capture him and take him to a castle in the Alps. Yes, you read that correctly. A Jurassic Park script just relocated the action from Isla Nubar to a freakin’ castle in the freakin’ alps. That’s not the crazy part. The crazy part is when Harris is introduced to a guy named Baron von Drax, who has a job offer for Harris. You see, Drax and his Grendel Corporation have been breeding their own dinosaurs in secret…but not just normal dinosaurs, oh no.
Harris is to be put in charge of team of genetically engineered hybrids who have been bred to have:
…super-sensitive smell and hearing, incredible strength and speed and pack-hunting instincts, and they have modified forelegs, lengthened and topped with more dextrous fingers, as well as dog DNA for increased obedience and human DNA so they can solve problems well. All of this is topped off with a drug-regulating implant that can dose them with adrenaline or serotonin as the situation demands.
Yeah. Jurassic Park 4 could have been some freakish hybrid of The A-Team and Dino-Riders. Harris even decides to take a page from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and give his dino soldiers pretentious nicknames: Achilles, Hector, Perseus, Orestes, and Spartacus.
It says in the synopsis that all five dinosaurs were of the same breed, deinonychus, which is “ sort of like a miniature T-rex.” The original poster at NeoGaf also claims these images were originally uploaded by concept artist Carlos Huante in 2009, so it’s unclear if they were designed for the same iteration of JP4 as the script synopsis. At the very least, it’s clear that the producers were still keen on the whole “mutant dinosaur” thing.
It’s probably just as well we never got to see this version of Jurassic Park 4, because it sounds like it had the potential to become a total train wreck. That being said, it also could have been a magnificent train wreck…
