"Jurassic World Rebirth" Official Trailer: Scarlett Johansson Leads a Dangerous Dinosaur Mission in New 'Jurassic' Installment with Jonathan Bailey and Mahershala Ali

'Godzilla' Director Gareth Edwards revives the prehistoric saga with a terrifying new chapter, featuring a covert mission, deadly creatures, and a return to the Jurassic Park lab.

This July will be jam-packed with big studio movies, each releasing just weeks apart. We expect it to be a record-breaking summer at the box office, even though it’s bound to be crowded. One such movie hitting theaters this July won’t feature superheroes but rather dinosaurs. Because, let’s face it, who doesn’t love dinosaurs? They have a long and storied film history, being one of the great cinematic attractions. Giant monsters that once roamed the Earth. What could be better on the big screen with a big bucket of popcorn Oh, wait—it’s another attempt to reboot the Jurassic Park franchise, and Black Widow is in it!

Alright, to be honest, we weren’t exactly excited about the Jurassic World franchise. We felt those movies were missing that special Spielbergian magic—and, more importantly, they lacked that childlike awe, that feeling of wonder at seeing dinosaurs come to life on the big screen. And don’t even get us started on the whole DNA cloning subplot—what the hell, man! But hey, those installments made a crap ton of money. So here we are.

Jurassic World Rebirth! Coming this summer! And the first official trailer is here to tickle your fancy. But look, it has dinosaurs—awesome-looking dinosaurs. You can't beat that.

And it stars Scarlett Johansson, apparently a self-proclaimed Jurassic Park superfan since childhood who has always wanted to be in a Jurassic movie. So, a dream-come-true moment for her.

In this new film set three years after the last Jurassic World installment, Johansson takes on the role of Zora Bennett, a covert operations expert leading a team of researchers and scientists on a mission to locate and extract rare dinosaur DNA for a medical breakthrough that could cure humans of deadly diseases. Her mission, a top-secret operation funded by a pharmaceutical company, is to travel to the original site of the first Jurassic Park research lab, located on a dinosaur-infested island near the equator. They must survive long enough to get off the island with their prize.

Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali joins Johansson, playing her team leader, Duncan Kincaid, a black-ops logistics expert running the ground unit and a longtime friend of Zora. Meanwhile, Jonathan Bailey, recently seen in the blockbuster Wicked, plays the team's resident paleontologist, Dr. Henry Loomis, who supposedly has a history with Dr. Alan Grant, the beloved franchise character portrayed by Sam Neill in the first Jurassic Park film and who returned for the third and final installment, Dominion.

Rounding out the cast are Rupert Friend, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, David Iacono, Audrina Miranda, Philippine Velge, Bechir Sylvain, and Ed Skrein.

Legendary producer Frank Marshall, a longtime producing partner of Steven Spielberg and co-founder of Spielberg’s famed production company Amblin, returns for this new installment of the franchise. In a recent Vanity Fair interview, Marshall revealed that the goal for this new film was to make it more "scary" and "dangerous."

But in many ways, the original Jurassic Park film was already those things. It really seemed like Spielberg was doing his version of a Kaiju film—it was his Godzilla franchise in a way. Which makes perfect sense that they picked filmmaker Gareth Edwards to handle the directing reins for this new franchise reboot. He’s the guy who kicked off the new Godzilla franchise, which now involves King Kong, with his 2014 Godzilla blockbuster.

Edwards also directed 2016’s Rogue One, which arguably still stands as the best Star Wars movie outside the original trilogy. And we have to give him his flowers—Edwards is quite skilled at shooting CG-heavy films without making the effects look too much like a video game. The Creator, the 2023 robot apocalypse sci-fi actioner that Edwards filmed with only an $80 million budget, proved that you don’t need a bloated production budget to make a film look cutting-edge and visually spectacular. Edwards was able to shoot on real locations and use that imagery as background plates for the special effects. And for his and his team's efforts, they were rewarded with an Oscar nomination for Best Visual Effects, competing against films with double the budgets. And from what we’re seeing in the trailer, Edwards is using the same approach—shooting on real locations and embracing the tactility of the gorgeous scenery while using it to enhance the realism of the computer effects.

It’s also worth noting that Jurassic World Rebirth welcomes the return of screenwriter David Koepp, who originally adapted Michael Crichton’s novel for the groundbreaking 1993 film. Koepp also penned the second Jurassic chapter, The Lost World, but left the franchise after that. It’s been reported that Koepp revisited the original novel to extract fresh concepts for this new movie, including reviving a cut sequence from the first film that was never filmed. He rewrote the scene, which is now included in Rebirth. It involves a small raft and a T-Rex. Eek!

Here’s the official synopsis:

A new era is born. This summer, three years after the Jurassic World trilogy concluded with each film surpassing $1 billion at the global box office, the enduring Jurassic series evolves in an ingenious new direction with Jurassic World Rebirth. Anchored by iconic action superstar Scarlett Johansson, Emmy and SAG nominee Jonathan Bailey and two-time Oscar® winner Mahershala Ali, this action-packed new chapter sees an extraction team race to the most dangerous place on Earth, an island research facility for the original Jurassic Park, inhabited by the worst of the worst that were left behind. Also starring acclaimed international stars Rupert Friend and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, the film is directed by dynamic visualist Gareth Edwards (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) from a script by original Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp. Five years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion, the planet’s ecology has proven largely inhospitable to dinosaurs. Those remaining exist in isolated equatorial environments with climates resembling the one in which they once thrived. The three most colossal creatures across land, sea and air within that tropical biosphere hold, in their DNA, the key to a drug that will bring miraculous life-saving benefits to humankind. Academy Award® nominee Johansson plays skilled covert operations expert Zora Bennett, contracted to lead a skilled team on a top-secret mission to secure the genetic material. When Zora’s operation intersects with a civilian family whose boating expedition was capsized by marauding aquatic dinos, they all find themselves stranded on a forbidden island that had once housed an undisclosed research facility for Jurassic Park. There, in a terrain populated by dinosaurs of vastly different species, they come face-to-face with a sinister, shocking discovery that has been hidden from the world for decades. Ali is Duncan Kincaid, Zora’s most trusted team member; Critics Choice and Olivier Award winner Jonathan Bailey plays paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis; Emmy nominee Rupert Friend appears as Big Pharma representative Martin Krebs and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo plays Reuben Delgado, the father of the shipwrecked civilian family.

Jurassic World Rebirth stomps into theaters this summer, starting July 2. Watch the trailer above.