Jurassic Park: Book vs. Movie
Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Jurassic Park is adapted from Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel. Both follow visitors stranded in a dinosaur park after its safeguards fail.
From Books Adapted
What changed from the book
Contains spoilersTap to show
The book's river escape was left out of the movie
Grant and the children travel downriver on a raft in Crichton's book, where they encounter a swimming Tyrannosaurus rex. The sequence was planned for the 1993 movie but dropped. Co-writer David Koepp said the cost and the difficulty of making a dinosaur swim with the available effects were obstacles.
Koepp later returned to that scene for Jurassic World Rebirth. The 2025 movie gives the river escape to the Delgado family.
Where the book came from
Crichton tried the idea as a screenplay first
The 1990 book grew out of an earlier attempt at a movie. In 1983, Crichton wrote a screenplay about cloning a pterodactyl from fossil DNA. He kept working on the idea, moved it into a theme park, and wrote a book told from a boy's point of view.
Several drafts met the same objection from his early readers, though they struggled to explain it. One finally said they wanted to follow the adults. Crichton rewrote the story from that perspective.
About the book and the movie
- Author
- Michael Crichton
- Year
- 1990
- Pages
- 455Buy book
- Audiobook length
- 15 hr 10 minGet audiobook
- Narrator
- Scott Brick
On a remote island off Costa Rica, billionaire John Hammond prepares to open a theme park populated by dinosaurs cloned from ancient DNA. When paleontologists Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler join mathematician Ian Malcolm and Hammond’s grandchildren for a safety inspection, failures in the park’s tightly controlled systems expose them to animals its creators do not understand and may no longer be able to contain.
- Director
- Steven Spielberg
- Writer
- Michael Crichton, David Koepp
- Year
- 1993
- Runtime
- 2 hr 7 minWatch on Amazon
- Cast
- Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough
- Genre
- action, Adventure, science fiction, Thriller
- IMDb
- View on IMDb
Billionaire John Hammond invites paleontologists Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler and mathematician Ian Malcolm to inspect Jurassic Park, an island attraction filled with cloned dinosaurs. When a disgruntled employee disables the park’s security systems, the visitors, including Hammond’s young grandchildren, are stranded among escaped predators and must find a way off the island.
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