When Jurassic World Rebirth hits the big screen, it’ll be packed with prehistoric favourites. Yes, the T-Rex is here. So is the Dilophosaurus. Even Jurassic Park III’s Spinosaurus is back on the scene. But the DNA-collecting expedition into dino-infested territory – led by Scarlett Johansson’s Zora Bennett, Jonathan Bailey’s Henry Loomis, and Mahershala Ali’s Duncan Kincaid – will bring fresh horrors too. Set not on Isla Nublar, nor Isla Sorna, but a third site where InGen’s most egregious genetic meddling went down, Rebirth will introduce all-new unholy oddities. Make way for Distortus Rex, or the ‘D-Rex’.
“It’s kind of like if the T-Rex was designed by H.R. Giger, and then that whole thing had sex with a Rancor,” director Gareth Edwards tells Empire of the mysterious beast, glimpsed in the trailers. With six limbs, teeth galore, and a ravenous appetite, you’ve never seen something quite like the D-Rex before. “It’s a design that I was really happy with,” says the director. “I’d like to buy the toy of it when it comes out.” And like the greatest movie monsters, it’s meant to inspire pity as well as terror. “It’s as if another animal has been wrapped around the T-Rex,” says ILM’s David Vickery. “Gareth wanted us to feel sorry for it as well as terrified, because its deformities have caused it some pain, and there’s an encumbrance to it.”
And that’s not all. As well as the D-Rex, we’ll meet the winged Mutadons, “a combination of a pterosaur and a Raptor,” says screenwriter David Koepp, who previously penned both Jurassic Park and The Lost World. “Those came from my strange mind,” he tells Empire of Rebirth’s mutants. “We saw in some of the previous Jurassic World movies that their experiments made dinosaurs bigger, meaner, scarier, and it occurred to me and Steven [Spielberg] that those can’t all have gone well.” Sometimes, life shouldn’t have found a way.