Back in the early 2000s, Universal Pictures flirted with a Jurassic Park 4 script so bizarre it felt like parody: militarized human-dino hybrids wielding guns. Alleged concept images were leaked online, and the script was practically laughed out of existence—until now.
With Jurassic World Rebirth (2025), the once-ridiculed concept suddenly feels less like discarded lore and more like delayed prophecy.
The official trailer for the film confirms one horrifying creation: a bizarre-looking creature that looks nothing like a dinosaur. Why? It’s a mutated version. Now, an exclusive with Empire has confirmed its name while also revealing other mutant dinos set to appear in the film. The giant one in the trailer? That’s “Distortus Rex”. The others? The “Mutadons”.
In the exclusive, director Gareth Edwards (2014’s Godzilla) describes the Distortus Rex as “kind of like if the T-Rex was designed by H.R. Giger [the artist who designed Alien‘s Xenomorph], and then that whole thing had sex with a Rancor [from Star Wars].”
It’s no stretch to say this is the furthest visual departure we’ve seen from the DNA of Spielberg’s 1993 original. As for the Mutadons, they’re “a combination of a pterosaur and a Raptor,” says screenwriter David Koepp, who penned the screenplay for the first two films, which were very much grounded in reality and backed by real science at the time.
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But let’s not pretend this came out of nowhere.
Jurassic World (2015) introduced weaponized raptors and the franchise’s first dino-hybrid. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) gave us human cloning and another dino-hybrid, this one guided to hunt by laser tech. More recently, Jurassic World Dominion (2022) featured underground dinosaur trafficking and more raptors with laser-targeting systems.
Each film has escalated the absurdity—and now that we’re seeing full-blown mutants, it’s hard to imagine Universal not finally pulling the trigger on humanoid dino-hybrids.
The problem is that it’s so far removed from the original 1993 film. 20 years ago, human-dino hybrids were a joke within the fandom. Now, they’re a few frames away from canon. The franchise isn’t just drifting from its origins—it’s sprinting away from them, claws out.
When Is Jurassic World Rebirth Out?
Jurassic World Rebirth releases in theaters on July 2. The film stars Scarlett Johansson (Avengers: Endgame), Jonathan Bailey (Bridgerton), Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (The Lincoln Lawyer), Rupert Friend (Obi-Wan Kenobi), Mahershala Ali (The Green Book), Luna Blaise (Manifest), David Iacono (Dead Boy Detectives), Audrina Miranda (Lopez vs Lopez), Philippine Velge (Station Eleven), Bechir Sylvain (BMF), and Ed Skrein (Deadpool).
Watch the trailer below:
