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The Jurassic Park series made a triumphant return to cinemas this year with Jurassic World (opens in new tab), which currently stands as the highest grossing film of 2015. The film which will likely usurp that title once its finished its cinematic run is Star Wars: The Force Awakens (opens in new tab), and Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy has been doing the promotional rounds ahead of the film’s release.
Of course, before she was president of Lucasfilm, Kennedy was Steven Spielberg’s producer, and she worked with the director on Jurassic Park. One of the most iconic characters of that film – and indeed the entire Jurassic Park series – is the Tyrannosaurus Rex, and while Kennedy was on the Nerdist podcast (opens in new tab) she revealed a fascinating story of what was originally meant to happen to the dangerous dinosaur.
“I was sitting by the monitor one time with Steven on Jurassic and about halfway through the movie we killed the T. Rex. He was sitting there and he goes, ‘Guys, guys come here—we can’t kill the T. Rex!'” Kennedy explained. “He had been watching the movie in his head as we’re shooting, and we’re halfway through the process and we’re nearing the moment where we’re gonna shoot the scene where we kill the T. Rex and he’s like, ‘No, the T. Rex is the star of the movie. We can’t kill him.'”
“So we called the production designer Rick Carter over and we, literally right by the monitor, started to talk about how we were going to change the next scene and the entire end of the film as we were making it, so that we could keep our leading actor, the T. Rex, alive.”
It’s amazing to think that Jurassic Park‘s classic ending – which sees the T. Rex save the film’s human characters from velociraptors – almost never happened. There’s probably only one director who had the smarts and the guts to make that huge call to change the ending, and that’s Spielberg. No wonder he’s a living legend…
Images: Universal Pictures
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