Jurassic Park III is a 2001 American science fiction adventure thriller film.[3] It is the third installment in the Jurassic Park franchise and the final film in the original Jurassic Park trilogy, following The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997). The film stars Sam Neill, William H. Macy, Téa Leoni, Alessandro Nivola, Trevor Morgan, and Michael Jeter. It was written by Peter Buchman, Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, and was directed by Joe Johnston. It is the first film in the franchise to not be directed by Steven Spielberg, who served as executive producer instead. It is also the franchise's first film to not be based on a novel by Michael Crichton, although the film includes characters and ideas by him, including scenes from his first novel Jurassic Park (1990).
Like its predecessor, the film takes place on Isla Sorna, a fictional island of cloned dinosaurs located off Central America's Pacific coast. The film involves a divorced couple (portrayed by Macy and Leoni) who trick paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant (Neill) into helping them find their son (Morgan), who is missing on the island. Neill and Laura Dern reprised their roles from the first film, Jurassic Park (1993).
After the release of Spielberg's Jurassic Park, Joe Johnston expressed interest in directing a sequel. Although Spielberg would return to direct the first sequel, he gave Johnston permission to direct a possible third film. Universal Pictures announced a third film in June 1998, with a release scheduled for mid-2000. Craig Rosenberg wrote the first draft of the script, about teenagers becoming marooned on Isla Sorna. Johnston was announced as director in 1999, and Rosenberg's draft was rejected. A second draft, by Buchman, involved Pteranodons escaping to the Costa Rican mainland and killing people, while a parallel story within the script would involve Alan Grant and others crash-landing on Isla Sorna.
Approximately five weeks before the start of filming, Johnston and Spielberg rejected the second draft in favor of a simpler story idea suggested by David Koepp, the writer of the previous two films. Payne and Taylor were hired to rewrite the earlier script by Buchman, who made further revisions to their draft. The script also received uncredited work by John August. Filming lasted five months, and began in Hawaii on August 30, 2000, before moving to California. A final draft of the script was never completed during production, and Johnston considered quitting the project on a few occasions because of uncertainty about how the film would turn out. As with previous films, Jurassic Park III features a combination of computer-generated and animatronic dinosaurs, created respectively by Industrial Light & Magic and Stan Winston. Unlike the previous films, Jurassic Park III features the Spinosaurus as the main dinosaur antagonist, replacing the Tyrannosaurus rex.
Jurassic Park III was theatrically released on July 18, 2001. Despite mixed reviews from critics, the film was successful at the box office, grossing $368 million worldwide. Nevertheless, it is the lowest-grossing installment in the series. The next film in the series, Jurassic World, was released in June 2015, starting the Jurassic World trilogy. Neill and Dern reprise their roles in the upcoming film, Jurassic World: Dominion, scheduled to be released on June 10, 2022.
