Jurassic World 2 goes for a new, slightly more pretentious title

Even movies about cloned dinosaurs sometimes need a fancy title, and it appears that Jurassic World 2 has gone that route.

Jurassic World seemed like an appropriate escalation, title-wise. After all, it had been about a decade since the last movie had reached theaters. In the ensuing years, movies had grown bigger and bigger. So, the bigger dinosaur movie got a bigger title.

But that may have created a problem. You see, now that there’s a sequel to the bigger dinosaur movie, it needs to have an even bigger title.

And when your plan for your sequel to a billion-dollar-grossing movie is to go for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and announce it a year ahead of time for a June 22, 2018 release date, you may have flown too close to the sun:

I suppose that makes me the sunlight and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom Icarus, but I accept this duty. Let’s get to some analysis.

This title accomplishes a couple different things. First, it captures the idea that this is the dark, gritty second movie. Look at those embers! This is a very serious movie about cloned dinosaurs wreaking havoc and the humans who didn’t learn that it was a bad idea the first time they tried to clone dinosaurs. “Life finds a way,” indeed. Why can’t everyone just listen to Jeff Goldblum so we don’t have to use the iconic line as a tagline some 20-plus years later?

Second, the odds are that there’s going to be some new flavor of Tyrannosaurus rex like the Indominus from Jurassic World, who was only subdued by the old Tyrannosaurus rex of the original films because of nostalgia. Rex, after all, means king, and an easy way for a kingdom to fall is to kill its ruler.

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Whether or not the movie’s antagonist dinosaur will kill the original T. rex just to prove how big and bad it is remains to be seen, but we point back to all the black and the embers. We’re not saying it’s going to happen, but it kind of seems likely.