The following contains minor spoilers for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.
The Jurassic Park franchise has come a long way since Steven Spielberg left the director's chair. However, the film series' most recent installment paid tribute to the man with easter eggs dedicated to another of his classics. It turns out that Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom included a few references to E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. J.A. Bayona, director of the next film which saw Speilberg on board as an executive producer, is an admitted Spielberg fan and he recently revealed several call outs to the film, one obvious, and the others a bit less so.
The first is actually visible in the image above. We see the character of Maisie, a young girl who is the granddaughter of the man who sends our heroes on the adventure to rescue the dinosaurs. Maisie spends a large portion of the movie wearing a red hoodie, which is meant to evoke the image of Henry Thomas' Elliot from E.T. who wears the same item of clothing during that film's finale.
The second is a bit more obvious, though potentially harder to see. Late in the film, Maisie runs away from the Indoraptor and hides in her room. Unsurprisingly, the dinosaur finds here and a fight ensues. Maisie's room is full of toys, likely gifts from her doting grandfather, and one of them, J.A. Bayona tells Yahoo, is an E.T. figure.
In the dinosaur fight in Maisie's room, there's a lot of toys, and if you take a look at the toys, you will see there's an E.T. character there. You try to have fun, but at the same time you try to integrate that nostalgia into the story you're telling.
It's actually somewhat fitting. Without going too deep into spoilers, it makes some sense that Maisie's toys would include characters from movies in the mid-1980s. While E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial has certainly stood the test of time and is likely seen by lots of kids, there probably aren't that many new E.T. toys being produced, but there's a reason that one might be in the house.
Finally, the last shot of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom provides a third E.T. easter egg, though this one is a bit meta. The end of the film shows Blue the raptor standing atop a bluff overlooking a fairly normal looking subdivision. As it turns out, the neighborhood Blue is checking out is the exact same one where E.T. was filmed.
That's a lot of cool E.T. references for the serious fan. If you haven't seen Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom yet, you can look for them all in theaters now.
