Where to watch Jurassic Park III (2001)

Trivia & production notes

• Sam Neill turned down a role in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring to return as Alan Grant in Jurassic Park III.
• William H. Macy initially declined his role due to scheduling conflicts, causing filming to be delayed by a month until Laura Dern urged him to reconsider.
• Directors Joe Johnston and Steven Spielberg rejected an entire second script about five weeks before filming began, despite $18 million already being spent and the film storyboarded and budgeted.
• David Koepp, who wrote the first two Jurassic Park films, had no involvement in writing Jurassic Park III, though he suggested the simpler rescue mission plot concept.
• Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor were hired to rewrite the script after impressing Universal with their work on Meet the Parents, despite not being hardcore fans of the Jurassic Park franchise.
• Much of the comedic dialogue added by Payne and Taylor to the script was removed from the final film, with Payne noting the studio kept only the action sequences.
• Laura Dern was initially hesitant to return for only a cameo appearance, but Steven Spielberg convinced her by suggesting her character Ellie would play an important role in saving the characters on the island.
• Spielberg's original story concept for the film involved Alan Grant secretly living in a tree on an InGen island after being denied research access, which director Johnston rejected as implausible.
• Craig Rosenberg's first draft featured teenagers stranded on Isla Sorna and included a Kronosaurus sequence that did not appear in the final film.
• Joe Johnston rejected Rosenberg's teenage-centered script in September 1999, saying it read like a bad episode of Friends despite being well-written.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Jurassic Park III, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.