When a movie is financially successful, the sequel, with a larger budget, is almost always around the corner. When that movie is Jurassic World, what's around the corner is absolutely massive. The relaunch of the franchise last year was a massive hit for Universal, becoming not simply the box office champ for the summer, but one of the highest grossing movies of all time. Apparently, success like that earns you an equally massive budget for your follow-up, as Jurassic World 2 reportedly has an absolutely staggering budget of $260 million.
The original Jurassic World had a perfectly reasonable, for a summer blockbuster, budget of $150 million. However, as the movie brought in more than $1.6 billion, the return on investment was still ridiculously high. It would seem that Universal is hoping that an increase in the budget will have an equivalent, or better, impact on the box office. The figure comes from a perfectly legit source too. The movie's director JA Bayona, gave a recent interview to Spanish-language magazine El Pais Seminal which has been translated by Scified. While it's possible something was lost in translation, even in another language, numbers are usually pretty straightforward.
CinemaBlend has reached out to the studio to confirm this number. We have not heard back as of this writing, however, Slashfilm has a source claiming that the budget for the film has not yet been determined. This apparently puts a couple of reliable sources at odds. Hopefully the studio will respond and break the stalemate.
$260 million does seem like an awful lot of money to throw at the Jurassic World sequel. While budget's an excess of $250 million are not entirely outside the realm of possibility, this would place Jurassic World 2 instantly into the top five production budgets of all time. While a studio might be willing to do this if they believed the return would be strong enough, one would think there must be a reason that the budget would be so high, but JA Bayona does not make any comment about what he's planning that could be so expensive. All we can say is that if the new film needs an extra hundred million dollars, we can't wait to see why.
While the performance of Jurassic World is certainly a strong indication that a sequel would do well, it's far from a certainty. The more money that a studio puts out, the more they must make back in order to be profitable, and if this past summer has taught us anything, it's that there's no guarantee that sequels will resonate with an audience. Even if $260 million is a number that Universal might be willing to dole out for Jurassic World 2 that doesn't mean it's a number they're comfortable with.
Does Jurassic World 2 need to be bigger in order to be better? What would you like to see the sequel do with a $260 million budget? Let us know in the comments below.
