Is it time to start humming that immense John Williams theme in our heads again? It has been over a decade since our last trip to Jurassic Park with Dr. Alan Grant, but it seems like we’re edging closer and closer to heading back there again. It won't be with Steven Spielberg at the helm again (but he’ll of course produce through Amblin), and just last month we heard that “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver were being handed the task of penning "Jurassic Park IV." At the time we pondered whether they’d be starting from scratch or working from the barmy John Sayles script or a more recent Mark Protosevich draft, but we never stopped to wonder how soon we might be seeing “Jurassic Park IV.”
Well producer Frank Marshall has been chatting with the folks over at Collider, and he’s eyeing a release date sooner than we would have imagined for a film which has languished for over a decade. “I would say that it will be on the screen within two years,” said Marshall, before adding that he also saw it as most definitely a summer release. Marshall also went on to confirm that this would definitely be a sequel and not a reboot – we hope that means that Sam Neill and Laura Dern will be back – and that advances in technology should mean we’ll be seeing whoever takes the director’s gig “do some great things.”
While we’re thrilled that we might get another "Jurassic Park" film as soon as 2014, we hope that such a provisional release date doesn’t mean the script gets rushed into production. Jaffa and Silver were only hired a month ago and if they are starting on something completely from scratch then it seems like a tight turnaround to us. We know part of the appeal for this kind of film will be the visuals, but if “Prometheus” taught us anything it’s that story should be king. But hey, we trust that Amblin and Spielberg would put the brakes on if quality looked set to be compromised, and the very fact that a summer 2014 date is being mooted can only be encouraging news. We’ll now wait patiently for an official release date announcement. *checks watch*