The reviews of the Jurassic Park franchise have been on a pretty consistent downward trajectory ever since 1993. The Steven Spielberg original was a critical and commercial favorite right out of the gate; it current stands at 92 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. With the exception of the first Jurassic World, which got a decent 71 percent score, every subsequent film has been the lowest reviewed Jurassic movie to that time. The Lost World: Jurassic Park got a 53 percent, Jurassic Park III got a 48, and the recent Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom earned a lowly 47 percent.
We won’t have a really solid sense of Jurassic World: Dominion’s final Rotten Tomatoes score for at least a week or so, but the earliest reviews for the film broke on social media tonight. Based on what we’re seeing so far, that trend of each Jurassic hitting a new low for the franchise could definitely be intact. Some of the critics who saw the film so far had positive things to say about it, mostly about the returning cast from the original Jurassic Park. And nearly everyone praises the special effects and the dinosaur action.
On the other hand, a lot of the early reviews were decidedly mixed, and some of the first tweets about the film drop words like “jumbled,” “contrived,” “awful” and “BAD.” (The all-caps was their choice, not mine.) Not the sort of stuff you want to see going into a movie’s big opening weekend.
Here’s a sampling of the early Jurassic World: Dominion reviews…
Jurassic World: Dominion opens in theaters on June 10. ScreenCrush’s full review is coming on Wednesday afternoon. We’ll wait and see where that Rotten Tomatoes score winds up after that. Based on these early tweets, it definitely looks possible it could have the worst reviews of any film of the franchise. Right now, it’s too early to tell.
Great Movies That Became Horrible Franchises
Sometimes the best movies make the worst franchises. In the ten examples below, inventive, groundbreaking cinema became the source material for some of our least favorite film series.
