Jurassic World: Rebirth director Gareth Edwards reveals surprise Ridley Scott movie inspiration
Jurassic World: Rebirth director Gareth Edwards has revealed his film was influenced by Sir Ridley Scott’s 2005 epic Kingdom of Heaven.
Jurassic World: Rebirth was inspired by Sir Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven, director Gareth Edwards has revealed.
The 50-year-old filmmaker is helming the next era in the Jurassic era, and has now spilled Scott’s “visually stunning” 2005 epic Kingdom of Heaven was a big influence in making Jurassic World: Rebirth.
In the July 2025 issue of SFX Magazine, Edwards said of Kingdom of Heaven: “John Mathieson was the director of photography and the more and more I looked at it, the more I was like, ‘This is perfection. There’s not a bad frame in this movie.’
“I’ve always had this love for his work. When you start a film like this, you have a group of names you’d like to work with, and the studio have a group of names they would trust.”
The Rogue One: A Star Wars Story filmmaker added it was important to him to bring in VFX veteran David Vickery - who served as the visual effects supervisor on 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and 2022’s Jurassic World: Dominion - to help capture the right visual style for Jurassic World: Rebirth.
Edwards explained: “He’s just brilliant and kind of like the world’s best person at dinosaurs. But he was sort of done with doing dinosaur films. He didn’t want to do another one.”
Recalling how he persuaded Vickery to board Jurassic World: Rebirth, the filmmaker told the VFX supervisor: “‘I don’t want this to feel animated. I don’t want it to feel like we’ve anthropomorphized these creatures.’
“I would love it if we could build a massive catalogue of natural history and essentially, every single shot in this movie is based on a piece of existing footage of a real animal really doing whatever it is that’s happening.”
Jurassic World: Rebirth - which stars Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey and Mahershala Ali - follows a team of covert operatives who race to stop a rogue biotech group unleashing weaponised dinosaurs across the globe.
As prehistoric chaos spreads, the group must confront a dark secret tied to the original Jurassic legacy.
Edwards previously said he wanted to revitalise the Jurassic Park franchise’s “horror” elements with Jurassic World: Rebirth - which hits cinemas on 2 July 2025.
He explained to Vanity Fair: “Jurassic Park [the original 1993 movie] is a horror film in the witness protection program. Most people don’t think of it like that.
“We all went to see it as kids. But I was scared s*******, to be honest, when I was at the cinema watching the T. rex attack.
“It’s one of the most well-directed scenes in cinema history, so the bar’s really high to come on board and try and do this.”
The Creator director added: “There’s something very primal that’s buried deep inside everybody. As mammals, we evolved [with] this fear of the bigger animal that’s going to come one day and maybe kill us or our family.
“The second we see it happening onscreen, you’re like, ‘I knew it … We had it too good for too long.’”
