You can rely on the Netflix movie release schedule to bring new audiences to previously-underrated world or indie hits, but now and then it also gives us an opportunity to revisit maligned blockbusters, and that's happening right now with a 5-year-old Chris Pratt movie.
After being released on Netflix UK in mid-August, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has shot up the movie rankings. It's currently the fourth-most watched movie, beating recent originals on the streamer like The Monkey King and Heart of Stone, giving the movie a mini-revival like what Mortal Engines enjoyed last month.
Fallen Kingdom is the fifth movie in the Jurassic Park franchise. It follows in the wake of Jurassic World as many of the main characters, including Chris Pratt's Owen Grady and Bryce Dallas-Howard's Claire Dearing, return to the island to rescue many of the escaped dinosaurs before a volcano wipes them out. It also deals with attempts by black market traders to deal in smuggled dinosaurs, including a new human-made dino called the Indoraptor. Suffice to say, Fallen Kingdom was really divisive when it came out.
Critically, the film was torn apart like lots of the dino's victims in the film. At the time of writing, it has a 46% critic and 48% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, with the only Jurassic Park movie with a lower score being Jurassic Park: Dominion, which came out later.
In fact, this was only the second movie in the dino franchise to get below 50% on the review aggregate site, after Jurassic Park III which still reviewed better. But it was a disappointing reception for fans of the World revival, given that the first Jurassic World was very well reviewed.
Despite this reception, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom was a smash hit at the box office. According to Box Office Mojo it made over $1.3 billion in its initial five-week release, not including re-releases or physical sales, from a budget of around $170 million.
For context, in 2023 only The Super Mario Bros. Movie has beaten that figure, and only by a tiny margin (though Barbie could also slip ahead, given that it's still performing in its theatrical run at the time of writing). Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom was third-best performing in 2018, beaten only by the Marvel movies Avengers: Infinity War and Black Panther.
Clearly, despite the bad reviews, movie fans flocked to cinemas to catch this fifth Jurassic Park movie, and five years later Netflix subscribers are doing just the same. So should you stream it too?
Well, as the reviews and box office show, this movie is divisive, so it's not for everybody, but some people who like this film really like it (for example the writer of this article).
It's the first Jurassic Park movie to present something distinctly new since the original, as it's the first in the series that doesn't spend the majority of its time on one of the dino islands. It's also much darker than the other movies, between a volcano wiping out an entire island of dinosaurs (including a very sad Brachiosaurus), and a finale setpiece that takes your typical gothic mansion horror movie and throws in a predatory super-dino into the mix.
Director J.A. Bayona clearly brings a new style to the franchise too, coming off gothic horror projects like Penny Dreadful and The Orphanage.
It's not a movie for fans of realism, getting quite a bit sillier than most of the other Jurassic Park movies, but its largest issue is that it sets up a thrilling future for the Jurassic World trilogy that Dominion absolutely failed to pay off.
So we'd recommend joining all the other Netflix subscribers in giving Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom a stream, especially given the TV and movie release slowdown we're seeing, and fingers crossed more of the Jurassic Park movies get added to the streamer so we can marathon them.
