Gareth Edwards was expected to direct the sequel to 2025’s Jurassic World Rebirth. Now he’s said to have left due to “creative differences”.
In February 2024, director Gareth Edwards signed up for a particularly challenging assignment. He had the task of directing a big, complicated Jurassic Park sequel, with all its special effects, location filming and Hollywood stars. But just to add to the drama, Edwards needed to have it finished and ready for the following June – giving him little more than a year to get the thing finished.
Given the constraints, the resulting Jurassic World Rebirth was a qualified success: its pulp adventure story didn’t exactly push boundaries, but it was entertaining, and Edwards’ experience in special effects meant that it often looked terrific. It was a decent box office hit as well, making around $870m on a $180m-ish budget.
Universal and Amblin wanted a less expensive yet still crowd-pleasing dinosaur thriller after the wildly over-running Jurassic World Dominion, and that’s what they got.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Edwards is no longer directing Jurassic World Rebirth’s sequel. The word is that he’s left the project due to the classic “creative differences”, though at this stage it isn’t clear what those were.
In a short and sweet statement, Universal talked about the British filmmaker in the past tense: “We had an incredible experience working with Gareth on Jurassic World Rebirth,” the studio wrote.
In November 2025, it was previously reported that Rebirth’s stars, Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali and Jonathan Bailey were all set to return, with Edwards also due to direct again at the time.
Edwards’ departure leaves the position open, so we’ll have to wait to see who takes over. It also remains to be seen what Edwards will tackle next; having made three massive films in the last 12 years – Godzilla, Rogue One, Rebirth – he may return to the smaller-budget scale of The Creator or even his indie debut, Monsters. We’ll keep you posted.
