Did you know a five-season animated Jurassic World series was released on Netflix? No? Well, if you’re a diehard dinosaur fan, you ought to check it out. At least until the end of season 3, Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous was pretty sweet and more mature than you’d expect. Now, Chaos Theory aims to be a darker follow-up.
Entertainment Weekly has all the new details about DreamWorks Animation’s sequel series, which debuts ten episodes on May 24 on Netflix. Plus, the streaming service has finally released a proper teaser trailer that better sets up the tone and the main premise.
Scott Kreamer, an executive producer and showrunner on Camp Cretaceous, explained why he jumped on the opportunity to helm a sequel series right after ending the previous one’s lengthy run. “I would want to tell a more sophisticated story with the older kids, tonally closer to the end of the Harry Potter movies than the beginning of the Harry Potter movies…it kept going from there, and people luckily got on board,” he explained.
While we’ve yet to see how “sophisticated” the story can get, since it’s still a show largely made for the younger viewers after all, I personally wouldn’t question Kreamer and his team’s aspirations, as Camp Cretaceous often became weightier and more menacing than anyone could’ve anticipated despite its seemingly innocent look. It also developed its main cast of characters in far more interesting ways than the three Jurassic World movies, and I wish I was exaggerating.
Of course, time (roughly six years) has passed for Darius, Ben, and surely other kids from the original show, and now dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals are part of the world’s ecosystems and another cog in the capitalist machine. “What’s great about Dominion is it tells this big story about what it looks like with dinosaurs in the world,” Kreamer says. It sounds like the creative team is interested in further exploring the new status quo introduced at the end of 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom that Dominion (2022) ultimately didn’t do much with. The full interview with him and some members of the cast is well worth a read if you’re curious about what’s next for the Nublar Six.
On top of the animated “conspiracy thriller” (color me very interested) that’s being teased here despite the target audience, Jurassic World will be back soon-ish in cinemas with a new movie directed by Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’s Gareth Edwards that could be led by Scarlett Johansson if negotiations don’t fall through. Additionally, there’s a new Jurassic Park video game (with survival horror vibes) coming from Saber. This franchise is nowhere near extinct.