NOW TV is celebrating the 25th anniversary of Jurassic Park by playing homage to one of the film’s most memed scenes and hottest hunks – by erecting a giant statue of Jeff Goldblum in Potters Field today, causing a stir amongst commuters and providing serious eye candy for any passers-by.
- Jurassic Park earned a gigantic $357 million in North America and a total of $914 worldwide. That was enough to surpass Spielberg’s famous E.T to take the record as the biggest hit film of all time, a record held for 5 years, until Titanic.
- When the film first aired on NBC on television for the first time in 1995, it had over 65 million viewers. This made it the most-seen-movie on television taking the top spot over 1987’s Trading Places.
- Universal Studios engineers were at work building Jurassic Park before Spielberg even began filming the movie. The attraction at Universal Studios in Hollywood opened in 1996 and cost almost twice what the film cost to make ($110 million).
- Universal released a 3D version of Jurassic Park in cinemas. It cost $10 million dollars to convert the film from 2D to 3D. It then went on to earn another $45.4 million in domestic ticket sales.
- Despite the movie’s running time is 127 minutes, the scenes where dinosaurs appear is just a total of 15 minutes.
- While Michael Crichton was still writing the novel that the movie was based on, a bidding war started. Some of the directors that were in the running were Tim Burton, Joe Dante, and Richard Donner. Spielberg was Crichton’s first choice.
- William Hurt, Richard Dreyfuss, and Harrison Ford were offered the role of Dr. Alan Grant. Sam Neil ended up being the best fit.
- Spielberg famously lured acclaimed British director Sir Richard Attenborough out of a 14-year acting retirement and cast him as John Hammond, but Jurassic Park was actually the third film Spielberg had asked him to appear in.
- Sean Connery was also offered the role of John Hammond.
- Jeff Goldblum and Laura Dern ended up dating for two years after filming.
- On set, the T. rex occasionally malfunctioned, due to the rain. Producer Kathleen Kennedy recalled, “The T. rex went into the heebie-jeebies sometimes. Scared the crap out of us. We’d be, like, eating lunch, and all of a sudden a T. rex would come alive. At first we didn’t know what was happening, and then we realized it was the rain. You’d hear people start screaming.”
- The crew had to have safety meetings about the T. rex; it weighed 12,000 pounds and was extremely powerful. They used flashing lights to announce when it was about to come on to alert the crew, because if you stood next to it and the head went by at speed, it felt like a bus going by.
- In Jurassic Park when the T. rex comes through the glass roof of the Ford Explorer in the first attack, the glass was not meant to break. No wonder the screams sounded so genuine and terrified!
- The Tyrannosaurus’s roars were a combination of dog, penguin, tiger, alligator, and elephant sounds.
- The noise used to convey the velociraptors talking to each other is actually the sound of tortoises having sex.
- The rippling water scene that everyone remembers was inspired by a mirror shaking in Spielberg’s car while he was listening to Earth, Wind, and Fire. Then the effect was created by placing the glass of water on a vibrating guitar.
- Sam Neill injured himself with the flare he uses to distract the T. rex. According to Neill, “It dropped some burning phosphorous on me and got under my watch and took a chunk of my arm out.”
- All of the cast members were given a raptor model signed by Steven Spielberg as a gift once the film had wrapped. Jeff Goldblum’s model has a prime spot in his house and is a cherished object.
- Jurassic Park was shot on location in 1992 on Hawaii’s Kauai Island. The most powerful hurricane to hit Hawaii in recorded history hit at the same time they were filming. Attenborough apparently slept through the worst of it!
- The cast ended up being stranded for a few days in a motel without food or water when the hurricane hit the location they were shooting.
- The 3D Unix interface that Lex uses to reboot the park’s power is actually a real program.
- For all the ground-breaking computer animated and animatronic puppet effects within the film, several scenes were created by crew members wearing rubber suits.
- All the raptors in the Jurassic Park are females. The males joined them in Jurassic World.
- While filming, the T. rex was nothing more than a man waving a long stick with a drawing of the dinosaur’s head attached to it.
- The original ending had one of the raptors killed after getting stuck in a T. rex skeleton that crashes to the ground. But after seeing the success of the T. rex sequences, Spielberg was inspired to bring back the gigantic dinosaur for one last heroic appearance
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