Filmmakers may live or die, but IP is forever. Even when a franchise looks dead, you can bring it back from the grave — just like a dinosaur resurrected with DNA from a mosquito in amber.
As you might have guessed already (I mean, you read the headline, right?) this is not an example plucked from the air at random. The latest bit of movie news involves a key member of the Jurassic Park creative team bringing back another famous franchise by Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton. That would be Westworld, the film and later television series that predated Jurassic Park and presented Crichton’s first vision of a high-tech theme park descending into chaos.
Deadline reports that David Koepp, screenwriter of Jurassic Park and several of its sequels, “will revisit Westworld, the 1973 film written and directed by Crichton about an adult fantasy park that allows monied guests with a hankering for the Old West to go up against a coterie of robots wielding six-guns.”
The original Westworld, starring Yul Brynner as a nameless robot who pursues a couple of vacationers in the park, became a sizable enough hit in the ’70s to spawn a sequel (1976’s Futureworld) and a TV spinoff (1980’s Beyond Westworld).
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More recently, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy rebooted Westworld as a series for HBO. Their version contained the same premise — a futuristic theme park goes bad — but told its story with complex overlapping timelines and later left the park behind almost entirely to tell a broader cautionary tale about artificial intelligence and technology.
The show got off to a very buzzy, critically-acclaimed start, but its ratings declined after its first season. HBO ultimately canceled their Westworld before a planned fifth season could fully conclude its overarching storyline. At this point, you can’t even watch the old episodes on HBO Max.
Koeep wrote the scripts for Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic Park and recently returned to the franchise to pen the screenplay for Jurassic World Rebirth. His other notable projects as screenwriter include Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, and the first Spider-Man.
Deadline claims an unnamed “major filmmaker” is circling his Westworld reboot.
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Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky