Jurassic World is expanding – and it's coming for you. The 65-city Jurassic World Live Tour kicks off in September, and includes a life-size T-Rex model unlike anything we've seen before.
Modeled after the Jurassic World dinosaur that fights the Indominus rex in the film's climax, the tyrannosaurus rex model is 42 feet long and weighs 8,000 pounds, traveling between six and 16 miles per hour. The dinosaurs of Jurassic Park and Jurassic World are mostly CGI, but it was a lifelong dream of Steven Spielberg's to make the life-size model a reality.
"It was really important for him to be able to bring these dinosaurs to life," the project's associate producer and director of production Chris Nobels told Mashable. "The believability and authenticity that you get out of an actual, physical dinosaur or puppet or animatronic is so much better and more lifelike than what you're able to get out of CGI, even though CGI is getting better and better."
Nobels' team worked closely to create not only the model, but an entirely new scripted adventure that takes place between Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, introducing new characters and another new dinosaur.
"We didn't want to recreate the movies but become an extension of the movies," Nobels said. "Basically what we're doing is if you were to shift the camera right or left from what the films are doing, we're telling that story of what else is going on on the island while everything that you've seen in the movies is happening."
The story was written by Shawn Thomas and Steve Jarczak and directed by Dan Shipton and Ross Nicholson. Though none of Nobels’ team works on the Jurassic World films, they consulted heavily with Colin Trevorrow and Universal to make Jurassic World Live Tour a believable extension of the film canon. And, of course, an epic climax T-Rex battle.
Tickets for Jurassic World Live Tour are now available.