ChronoFive
Play today’s puzzle
Setting the scene
Early 1990s blockbusters relied on animatronics and stop-motion, with CGI limited to liquid metal in Terminator 2. Director Steven Spielberg acquired Michael Crichton's unpublished novel in 1990, planning to blend Stan Winston's practical dinosaurs with nascent computer graphics from Industrial Light & Magic. Audiences craved event movies after 1991's recession slump.
What happened
Jurassic Park premiered at Washington D.C.'s Uptown Theater June 9, 1993, and opened wide June 11 in 2,404 theaters. The film followed scientists Alan Grant, Ellie Sattler, and Ian Malcolm touring John Hammond's cloned-dinosaur park when security fails. It used 50 CGI shots and life-size animatronics, featuring groundbreaking Brachiosaurus and T. rex sequences set to John Williams' score.
Why it still matters
It grossed $914 million worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing film ever until Titanic, and won three Oscars for visual effects, sound. Jurassic Park proved CGI could portray living creatures, launching the digital-effects era and a six-film franchise. Memorable detail: the glass of water rippling from T. rex footsteps was created by vibrating a guitar string under the dashboard.
Background
Jurassic Park, later referred to as Jurassic World, is an American science fiction media franchise created by Michael Crichton, centered on a disastrous attempt to create a theme park of cloned dinosaurs. It began in 1990 when Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment bought the rights to Crichton's novel Jurassic Park before it was published. The book was successful, as was Steven Spielberg's 1993 film adaptation. The film received a theatrical 3D re-release in 2013, and was selected in 2018 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Its visual effects became a benchmark for CGI filmmaking.