JURASSIC PARK IV almost starred a gun-toting squad of commando dinos

It sounds like a gag out of Family Guy, but apparently a few years back Steven Spielberg was actually planning a Jurassic Park sequel that would have featured genetically engineered, intelligent dinosaurs who become a squad of gun-toting commandos. The idea got as far as the script stage, and in 2004 Ain't It Cool News had this to say:

"There’s the eight-year-old-boy side of me that thinks that a DIRTY DOZEN-style mercenary team of hyper-smart dinosaurs in body armor killing drug dealers and rescuing kidnapped children will be impossible to resist. And then there’s the side of me that says... WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!

[The main character] is put in charge of training these five dinosaurs, X1 through X5, and the first thing he does is name them. 'Any soldier worth his pay has a name to answer to, not a number,' he says. So we are introduced to Achilles, Hector, Perseus, Orestes, and Spartacus, each of them a specially created deinonychus, which is sort of like a miniature T-rex. They have super-sensitive smell and hearing, incredible strength and speed and pack-hunting instincts, and they have modified forelegs, lengthened and topped with more dextrous fingers, as well as dog DNA for increased obedience and human DNA so they can solve problems well. All of this is topped off with a drug-regulating implant that can dose them with adrenaline or serotonin as the situation demands."

Fortunately sanity prevailed, and the dino commando project was shelved. Director Joe Johnston has been (rather loosely) attached to Jurassic Park IV for a while, and recently he told hitfix.com that the sequel will have a different plotline.

There is an idea now for number four that is different from the first three, and that is more or less the beginning of a new trilogy, in that it sends the whole franchise off in a new direction. It's not about the dinosaur park anymore. It's about all-new characters. So Steven's busy right now with the stuff he's doing and I've got to do "Captain America," but hopefully afterwards, we'll find time to develop it. And really... it's something different that we haven't seen before in the "Jurassic Park" world.

(The clip above is from the widely-mocked game Jurassic Park: Trespasser.)

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