It was a tumultuous shoot (to say the least), but production finally wrapped on the latest entry in Universal's block-busting dino franchise, Jurassic World: Dominion, last November, and director Colin Trevorrow has now discussed the difficulties of finishing the movie in the midst of a global pandemic.
“On the very last day we were shooting, I didn’t find out officially that we were going to shut down until about three hours before we wrapped,” the filmmaker explains to Empire. “We were shooting in this old, industrial barn. [Producers] Alexandra Derbyshire and Pat Crowley and I had a phone call with Universal, and all of us agreed it was the right thing to do. But I still had a shoot day to finish.”
Even when shooting was deemed safe to resume last year, protocols required the cast and crew to isolate in a bubble for months after 40,000 coronavirus tests were administered.
“The scariest moment was [in late October] when we just had a couple of weeks left and the cases were rising exponentially,” Trevorrow continues. "Because we had the crew that we did and the actors were always on set, we were able to accelerate what we were doing. But we definitely had a fear that we might have a movie that was nine-tenths finished and remain that way.”
Thankfully, they were able to complete the film without anyone falling ill (that we know of), and Jurassic World: Dominion is now set to roar into theaters on June 10, 2022.
Check out a new behind-the-scenes image featuring Chris Pratt (Owen Grady) and Omar Sy (Barry) below.
Dominion will also see the return of Jurassic Park originals Sam Neil, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum. We're still not sure what kind of role they'll play in this film, but they are expected to make more than just brief cameo appearances after Goldblum's two minutes of screen-time in Fallen Kingdom came in for a lot of backlash.
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Mark Cassidy is a writer, photographer, amateur filmmaker, and Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic from Dublin, Ireland.