Jurassic World Rebirth Has Already Broken a Franchise Box Office Record After Just 1 Day in Theaters

One day into its theatrical release,Jurassic World Rebirth is already breaking records. The latest entry in the long-running dinosaur franchise has just posted the best opening day for the series, but there's a catch.

Per Deadline, Jurassic World Rebirth earned $30.5 million on Wednesday. While not the best opening day ever for the franchise, it is the best opening day for a Jurassicmovie that was released on a Wednesday, besting the $19 million that Jurassic Park III made back in 2001. Among opening days for the franchise, regardless of the day of release, Rebirth comes in at No. 4, behind 2015's Jurassic World ($81.9M), 2022's Dominion ($59.5M), and 2018's Fallen Kingdom ($58.5M). Rebirth is currently looking at a $80M 3-day, $133.5M 5-day domestic opening weekend.

Directed by Gareth Edwards, Jurassic World Rebirth picks up five years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion, following Scarlett Johansson's Zora Bennett, a skilled covert operations expert, as she and her team embark on a mission to collect genetic material from the world's three most colossal creatures, whose DNA holds the key to a drug that will bring miraculous life-saving benefits to humankind. However, after finding themselves stranded on an island with a civilian family whose boating expedition capsized, they uncover a shocking discovery that has been hidden from the world for decades.

Starring alongside Johansson in Rebirth are Mahershala Ali as Duncan Kincaid, Rupert Friend as Martin Krebs, and Manuel Garcia Rulfo as Reuben Delgado, with Luna Blaise, David Iacono, Audrina Miranda, Philippine Velge, Bechir Sylvain, and Ed Skrein rounding out the ensemble. Jonathan Bailey is also part of the cast, portraying paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis, who, as fans will learn in the movie, studied under Sam Neill's Dr. Alan Grant, one of the original three protagonists of the Jurassic franchise.

Jurassic World Rebirth Brought Back a Key Member of the Original Movies

Jurassic World Rebirth boasts a screenplay from David Koepp, marking his return to the franchise for the first time since 1997's The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Koepp worked with Michael Crichton to bring the latter's Jurassic Park novel to the big screen in Steven Spielberg's 1993 adaptation. He then returned to solely adapt Crichton's sequel, The Lost World, into a blockbuster screenplay.

As Koepp has revealed in interviews, the screenwriter wasn't initially interested in penning another Jurassic movie until Spielberg himself reached out. Together, the two came up with a story that felt more like the first two Jurassic Park movies than the later Jurassic Worldtrilogy. Among the ideas that made it into the final product were several unused materials from Crichton's two novels that had not yet been adapted for the big screen, including the long-awaited raft sequence, which Spielberg and Koepp couldn't find room for in the original 1993 blockbuster.