Is ‘Jurassic World Dominion’ the Next Woke Blockbuster?
Variety's interview with three female stars suggests so, but is it accurate?
Franchises fail for any number of reasons, from creative burnout to stories well past their expiration date.
They can collapse under different circumstances today, something studios rarely see until it’s too late.
Woke.
Consider “Terminator: Dark Fate,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “Men in Black: International” and “Ghostbusters.”
All four films failed to varying degrees. Each represented a step in Hollywood’s woke evolution. “Dark Fate” hung its marketing campaign on its female leads, for example, not the aging superstar who embodies the franchise.
“Charlie’s Angels” jettisoned the sexuality and silliness of the source material for stern empowerment beats. Even Slate.com noticed the difference.
Might “Jurassic World Dominion” learn this lesson the hard way?
![Jurassic World Dominion | Trailer 2 [HD]](https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-youtube-lyte/lyteCache.php?origThumbUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FDtQycgMD4HQ%2F0.jpg)
The June 10 release marks the sixth film in the mega-franchise, and box office experts predict it will soar past the $400 million mark stateside, at the very least. The franchise’s new players, Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, are joined by the trio who anchored the 1993 original – Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum.
That’s enough star power and nostalgia to fuel any Hollywood success story. Except Variety wants everyone to know there’s much more to “Dominion” than old friend and new dinosaurs.
The far-Left site’s “cover story” on the sequel details all the ways “Dominion” is feminist to the core. You have three strong, empowered starlets (Dern, Howard and newbie DeWanda Wise (TV’s “She’s Gotta Have It”), for starters.
The feature focuses on that trio, pushing Neill, Goldblum and Pratt to the periphery. That’s just the start of the feminist lectures, both in the article itself and, in theory, “Dominion.”
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The headline does a neat peek into the future, declaring the film’s three female leads “Summer’s Breakout Action Stars” weeks before the movie opens.
The woke lectures have only begun.
We learn far too much about a single line Dern uttered in the 1993 “Jurassic Park” (“Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth”). That feminist riposte that gets more than a dozen paragraphs in the article.
Director Colin Trevorrow, the man behind the franchise’s recent sequels, previously showed his woke side via a teaser photo from the film’s set.
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(Did Chris Pratt get paid the same as the guy who becomes dinosaur food in Act II?)
Now, he’s teasing Variety that Wise, a black actress playing a bisexual character in the sequel, may be the franchise’s new face.
“It was very important to introduce a new hero who could potentially define the future of this franchise,” director Colin Trevorrow says of Wise’s character. “We’ve had the opportunity to hopefully make someone that young girls are going to be dressing up as at Halloween for years to come.”
Couldn’t they dress up like Dern or Howard? And is Trevorrow going to hand off a massive franchise to Wise without any sense of her character connecting with audiences (yet)?
Next, we’re told the new generation of “Jurassic” women could be a Mary Sue invasion — flawless females ready to bore audiences with their perfection.
Ellie laid the groundwork for the “Jurassic” women who’ve followed — who are as compassionate as they are capable; desirable yet never the “sexy scientist” trope; and, above all, quick-witted, clever and not afraid to get up to their elbows in dinosaur dung.
Next, Variety gives us a lecture on why it’s important her character is bisexual but not part of the “strong black woman trope.”
Does this sound like an exhilarating summer movie or a Gender Studies assignment?
We even get the expected finger wag at anyone who recoils at all this wokeness.
But there have been haters. A small but vocal group of trolls criticized the casting [of Wise] as “woke.”
“As soon as you put a woman, a Black woman, a woman of color, or a person of color on screen, it has, to whomever, a connotation,” Wise says. “Whether they know the story yet or not, I’m inherently politicized. I know that.”
Remember when trolls lashed out at Billy Dee Williams in the “Star Wars” saga? Or Samuel L. Jackson? It didn’t happen. Audiences recoil at woke machinations, not the color of an actor’s skin.
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Just don’t call any of this “woke,” Variety and Dern warn us. The actress, who famously dressed down the most charismatic hero in “The Last Jedi” for no good reason other than, “Patriarchy Bad!,” won’t have it.
Emily Carmichael, a co-screenwriter on the film, then shares more of the film’s woke intentions.
And all the women got their chance to shine. “There’s a moment where Ellie has to grab [Chris Pratt’s] Owen and pull him up, so it’s her saving him,” Carmichael says. “I was standing next to Bryce by the monitor, and she nudged me and said, ‘Let’s normalize seeing this on screen.’ And I was like, ‘Bryce, you’re looking at the future, and I see it with you.’”
Two questions remain.
One, will a woke “Dominion” hurt the film’s box office tally? Almost nothing will stop the sequel from crushing the competition. But we’ve seen woke sequels come up short of expectations, even those that don’t officially torch their franchises.
The perfect example is “Star Wars.” The 2015 film “The Force Awakens,” which brought the saga back to the big screen, earned an astounding $936 million domestically. The woke sequel, “The Last Jedi,” generated $620 million.
Two, just how woke is the film itself? Actors routinely talk up the wokeness of their work, but it doesn’t always reflect the material itself.
The perfect example? “No Time to Die.”
The 2021 Bond adventure found the cast and crew blasting the “Bond girl” conceit, extolling the “new” 007 and describing the super spy as reborn for a new age.
The actual film avoided most woke pitfalls, however. (It also underperformed stateside).
The crew responsible for “Jurassic World Dominion” may not care if the woke flourishes impact the box office receipts. They’ve got a culture war to fight, and that matters as much as the bottom line.
If not more.
JuBlacksic Park. To woke for me. Hollywood is forcing and trying to push women of color as lead characters and they are dreadfully awful. Jeff Goldblum’s class was so disproportionate. The wokeness is so obviously desperate and pathetic it distracts from the movie.
Right wingers losing their shit over some lines is hilarious.
The fact that you’re triggered over taking the names of chairs is pathetic
I went and saw it with my family and have to say I wish I had stayed home and watched the ants marching along my backyard. It checked every woke box imaginable (spoilers below in case you care):
Owen Grady is pushed to the side in favor of Claire and Clone girl. Toward the end of the movie clone girl does the same move that Grady did in the first one, hand out and such to calm a dinosaur they had never met before.
Sam Neill’s character was pushed aside in favor of Ellie. He’s a stodgy old guy, stuck in the past; she’s at the forefront of it all.
As soon as I saw the “bi-sexual” (honestly I don’t see that, but ok) black woman being a smuggler I said to my wife, “I bet she will be the heart of gold who ends up saving them all.” I was right.
Ian Malcolm was his usual self, but his protégé (Ramsey Cole), was the real hero who let him in on it and stood up to the ever so “unique” white man bad guy.
These movies are so predictable today that everything I thought before I went and every character that appeared on the screen I was correct on.
tl;dr version:
good guy white men move to the back of the bus
bad guys are all white men and a single slightly ethnically diverse woman (think white with a tan)
women and minorities are heroes who will save the planet
Oh, my. Aren’t you a sensitive one. Do you always see things that aren’t there?
In case you are color blind, the main 5 characters are white. And they aren’t villains.
Gender roles definitely are switched, to a degree, in this film. There are a couple of things I want to talk about. 1. The films’ main emphasis is that science is the answer but the film contradicts itself. Obviously, science led to chaos for these people yet the film says science is good. What’s that supposed to mean? 2. At the end of the film, that dead scientist claims that we can all coexist but the film, once again, contradicts itself here. When we first see the mighty T-Rex get punked by the bigger dinosaur is one example of how these 2 apex predators did learn to coexist but that is only because these 2 dinosaurs were free to go where they wanted. Once they were forced to live in a cage with other apex predators is when they began to kill each other! That’s not coexistence. Then, the dinosaurs get released back into the wild and this is where we are told what the definition of coexistence is, according to Hollywood.
Am I wrong here? Did anyone else notice these contradictions?
Totally!! Just watched it today I couldn’t agree with you more.
I saw the movie; it’s only modestly woke. The filmmakers are trying to make it seem woker than it is for the liberal mag.
I didn’t realize the black female character was supposed to be bisexual until I read this. She’s essentially a black female ripoff of Han Solo; she even flies an old plane which seems inspired by the Millennium Falcon (in fact there’s quite a bit here weirdly inspired by Star Wars, including a scene in Malta which they try to make reminiscent of Tattooine.
She seems kind of shoehorned in here from another movie; her role doesn’t make a lot of sense. She’s apparently some sort of rogue mercenary pilot? It’s obvious that having a Strong Black Woman TM was their priority without much thought to whether or not the character belongs in this movie.
There’s definitely no subtlety to the identity politics.
We meet an Old White Guy and young black guy early on that are apparently the first and second in command of an Evil Genetics Research facility. There could have been some dramatic tension here as to whether or not they’re good or bad or trustworthy or not, but I predicted to s person I was seeing it with that the young black guy will be a Noble Soul and the Old White Guy evil incarnate, which of course is exactly what happens.
We see the now quite common Woke Trope of white guys, once heroes I’m a franchise, now tired and burnt out and cynical and needing to be rescued by women.
That said, it’s not a bad movie for what it is. If they make it the black female Han Solo the lead going forward it’s going to be really bad however
Interesting
It’s hard to argue that wokeism hasn’t been good for many people. This article is a great example. With no thesis other than pro-inequality and no tangible evidence for the affect of the thesis on the financial figures cited, the author has still found an outlet that is willing to publish the tears of a melting snowflake.
This is quite remarkable. The willingness of entertainment pundits to act as the tools of traditionally entertainment opposed political ideologies truly speaks to the lack of depth of those pundits and their flocks.
Pandering to the Ponzi scheme of populist politics is a most pitiable practice. Shortsighted and short lived, it always ends with the loudest voices being lost in a corner and becoming examples that the next generation of angry white people fail to heed.
I don’t know how I stumbled upon this blog, but it’s trash. Why does everything have to have some deeper “woke” agenda? Why can’t these subtle actions, such as removing the director’s name from a chair, just be considered nice gestures?
I get that you need material to get web traffic so you don’t have to go back to your job at Wendy’s, but this is not the way. Take off the tinfoil hat and back away from the right-wing propoganda.
Note: left-wing propoganda is equally as annoying, and I wish for all those blogs and articles to disappear too. Y’all on both sides are the scum of the earth trying to divide us. No thanks
How does the audience know these are empowered women? Maybe they are just menstruating men?
another clown who uses the word “woke” for everything, not understanding what everything means.
Openly say that you are only in favor of women in the kitchen, instead of finding enemies in Hollywood,
Indeed are giving reason that more promoting strong female leads are needed if you take it so badly.
I can see your fragility from here