[This story contains spoilers for Netflix’s Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous season three.]
After six months stranded on Isla Nublar, things are finally looking up for the Camp Cretaceous crew. In a game-changing moment for the animated Netflix series, the rag-tag group of teens sail off the dinosaur-infested island. It’s a move that paves the way for new kinds of adventures for the series, which spins out of the Jurassic World film franchise.
“What I like about this season is there is a defined victory,” says Jurassic World filmmaker Colin Trevorrow, who is an executive producer on the series and is currently in post on next summer’s Jurassic World: Dominion.
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Camp Cretaceous has spanned the events of Jurassic World (2015) and the start of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), which saw the destruction of Isla Nublar and gave the franchise one of its most heartbreaking images, a shot of a lone brachiosaurus on the docks, doomed to die on the island.
While the stranded Camp Cretaceous campers have apparently reached the six-month point between the first Jurassic World and the start of Fallen Kingdom, Trevorrow says not to expect to see that destructive moment portrayed in the show.
“We’ve seen the island destroyed in a movie and it really upset a lot of people. And I don’t know if we need to double down on that. I think that’s a one-time thing to witness,” says Trevorrow.
Instead, he hopes to take the show’s audience beyond what’s been in the films in a potential fourth season and beyond.
“If we are able to tell the whole story that we have plotted out here, that the writers have built, it will really give us a chance to go into some really new spaces that are a real departure from the movies,” says the Trevorrow. “People are hungry for that. Kids are hungry for that, but you still have to do the work to assure everybody that it’s part of the same world.”
The season three finale features a shot of beloved dinosaur Bumpy, happy and with her kind, as the kids leave the island. Despite Bumpy being alive and well, some audience members are worried about the baby Ankylosaurus’ fate, particularly knowing the island eventually will be destroyed.
Trevorrow acknowledges he gets a lot of questions about Bumpy’s safety, but suggests there’s no need to worry. (This is not Game of Thrones or even Avengers: Endgame, after all.)
“Our franchise is a little bit less a kill your heroes set of stories, and I personally feel the death of some of these characters in these big iconic stories we’ve been following all of our lives is kind of a dry run for the death of our parents, for the death of our loved ones,” says the filmmaker. “They can be really valuable for us in a lot of ways where you can get used to saying goodbye to somebody that you never imagined you would live without. … a lot of kids really love Bumpy so when you think about how you handle that kind of an attachment, you’ve got to be aware that it’s very serious and you could traumatize people.”
Trevorrow, who broke out with the Sundance hit Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) before moving to the big-budget realm with Jurassic World is currently posting Jurassic World: Dominion in a converted barn behind his house in the U.K. after wrapping principal photography in November.
Dominion, which stars Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard and returning Jurassic Park stars Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, was initially slated for June 11 of this year, but was pushed to July 2022 due to the coronavirus pandemic, which shut down production and closed theaters around the world. With theatergoing resuming in parts of the world, Trevorrow teases there will be some promotional push coming for Dominion, though could not say whether that meant a trailer or something else.
“It’s going to be sooner than you think. I can’t talk about it just yet,” says the filmmaker. “We’ve got something fun planned, and it has everything to do with getting people back into the movie theaters.”
