65 directors want to break Jurassic Park’s ‘monopoly on dinosaurs’
You’d think after 130-plus years of motion pictures, audiences would have seen it all, and that filmmakers might be out of ideas. But no, on March 10, writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, best known for their work on A Quiet Place, plop Adam Driver into the Cretaceous Period to fight dinosaurs with futuristic military tech and outrun a mass extinction event on the horizon. Movies!
Produced by Sam Raimi, 65 was a childhood dream for Beck and Woods, and it shows. The movie makes a big promise — dinos, meteors, laser guns, and a few sci-fi surprises, too — and as the duo tells Polygon, the whole project started at the playground. The Hollywood multihyphenates have known each other since they were 11 years old, and they’ve been dying to make a Dinosauria creature feature for nearly as long.
“Dinosaurs are such magical, bizarre creatures, and when you’re a young kid… it’s incomprehensible!” Woods says. “How did these giant creatures walk the Earth, the same Earth that we walk today? And I think ever since that age, we’ve always wondered, like… Do Spielberg and Universal [Pictures] have a monopoly on dinosaurs? Or is there a way to do one in a way that we haven’t seen before?”
“We love the idea of ticking-clock films, where catastrophic danger lurks around every corner,” Beck adds, citing 1994’s Keanu Reeves movie Speed, which escalates the action every five minutes, as a core influence on 65.
Over the years, Beck and Woods landed on a premise they hoped would give them the same vibe. Instead of finding reasons to bring dinosaurs into humankind’s present, the team cracked a plot that would pit a man against dinosaurs on their home turf of Earth, 65 million years ago. (How they set up that confrontation is far-out,
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