7 Movies That Would Be Better With Dinosaurs

Kim Taylor-Foster
Movies
Movies

If you love the Jurassic franchise, you’re not alone. As long as we’re getting to see dinosaurs on screen eating people, we don’t much care if the storyline is more or less a retread of the first film. With Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom almost upon us, we take a lighthearted look at what films would be infinitely improved with dinosaurs added to the mix. Hey, if you can introduce zombies to Pride and Prejudice and make a hit, you can certainly do the same with dinosaurs. Here are films that would be so much better with a side order of prehistoric beasts.

1. Fifty Shades of Grey

Fifty Shades of Grey
What this scene needs is a compsognathus or several running around.

Recently voted by the public in a survey as the most boring film of all time, the sexytime snoozefest could almost certainly be pepped up with a generous helping of prehistoric action. Why not introduce a little more danger into the saucy loveplay between Dakota Johnson’s Anastasia Steele and Jamie Dornan’s Christian Grey, with the threat of death at the claws and teeth of a dinosaur hanging over them? Or borrow from 10 Cloverfield Lane and use the dinos in a twist ending… for a stealth spin-off that integrates Fifty Shades into the Jurassic universe. Mind. Blown.

2. The Revenant

Leonardo DiCaprio may wrestle a grizzly, but jeez, what if that was just the start of it? Imagine if he emerged from that tussle, close to death, only to have to fight his way through a barrage of bigger beasts? Leo versus a pack of velociraptors? Leo going toe-to-toe with a T-Rex? Bring it on.

3. The Hateful Eight

The Hateful Eight
Think of the scenes of carnage caused by dinosaurs in the snow.

Don’t get us wrong. We love The Hateful Eight. But stirring some dinos into the mix would add an extra dimension to Tarantino’s bats–t cray cray double-crossing bounty hunter epic. Set in a remote wintry landscape. Dinosaurs in the snow? Yes, please. Samuel L. Jackson spitting Tarantino’s deliciously crafted words into the face of a cowering pachycephalosaurus before it rounds on Michael Madsen and butts him six ways from Sunday? WE ARE IN.

4. 2001: A Space Odyssey

https://www.fandom.com/articles/how-star-wars-can-get-back-on-track
That space dude could be being chased by a velociraptor.

A lot of people get on 2001’s case. “You’re boring!” they cry. It was even recently accused of being a snorefest in controversial teen suicide drama 13 Reasons Why. Encouraging a generation that’s never seen Stanley Kubrick’s seminal work of science fiction to… never see Stanly Kubrick’s seminal work of science fiction. So in the interests of making it, well, less boring, why not flood it with dinosaurs? Dinosaurs in space is an awesome concept – one which Doctor Who did actually tackle – and it’s one they could easily write in via a time thing. Or an alien thing. What if dinosaurs were actually aliens? There we go. Plot sorted.

5. The Twilight Saga: New Moon

Let’s make New Moon less about a teen love triangle — one of whom is human, one a vampire, and one a werewolf — and more about fighting dinosaurs. It could see shapeshifters and bloodsuckers team up to take on the T-Rexes and their ilk, resulting in a herd of vampire stegosaurus and lycanthrope brontosaurus that end up fighting each other to the death, bringing about dinosaur extinction once again.

6. Justice League

JusticeLeagueExplore
There's a dinosaur missing from this picture.

There’s a surefire way to make last year’s Justice League better. Dinosaurs. When the team resurrects Superman, perhaps at the same time they could inadvertently cause the re-establishment of the dinosaur population. And then have the rampaging prehistoric beasts take on big bad Steppenwolf and his Parademons while the assembled superheroes take a step back and carry on with their incessant banter. We’d care a lot less about their unfunny and occasionally misogynistic one-liners if we had a huge, fanged, zombie Spinosaurus to focus on.

7. Mamma Mia

There was a lot of criticism of Pierce Brosnan’s singing voice in Mamma Mia. What better way to detract attention from his bum notes than by introducing dinosaurs? Instead of the Greek island it’s set on, the action could shift to Isla Sorna – the secret island Richard Attenborough’s John Hammond and his company InGen populated with its genetically engineered test subjects, first seen in The Lost World: Jurassic Park – and the plot of Mamma Mia could play out with the stakes upped. And a few dinosaur-related lyrics added to the roster of ABBA songs: “Mamma Mia!/Here DINO again”…

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom hits screens in the UK on June 6, Australia on June 21 and the US on June 22.

Kim Taylor-Foster
Kim Taylor-Foster is Entertainment Editor for Fandom in the UK. She was raised on an unsteady diet of video nasties and violent action flicks.