Today's Article - Jurassic Park

This article is for quizzes on Monday January 2nd...

Jurassic Park is a 1993 American science-fiction adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg. The first installment of the Jurassic Park franchise, it is based on the 1990 novel of the same name by Michael Crichton, with a screenplay written by Crichton and David Koepp. The film is set on the fictional Isla Nublar, an islet located off Central America's Pacific Coast, near Costa Rica, where a billionaire philanthropist and a small team of genetic scientists have created a wildlife park of cloned dinosaurs.

Filming took place in California and Hawaii between August and November 1992, and post-production rolled until May 1993, supervised by Spielberg in Poland as he filmed Schindler's List. The dinosaurs were created with groundbreaking computer-generated imagery by Industrial Light & Magic and with life-sized animatronic dinosaurs built by Stan Winston's team. To showcase the film's sound design, which included a mixture of various animal noises for the dinosaur roars, Spielberg invested in the creation of DTS, a company specializing in digital surround sound formats.

Jurassic Park became the highest-grossing film released worldwide up to that time. Following $3.1 million from midnight screenings on June 10, the film earned $47 million in its first weekend, with the $50.1 million total breaking the opening weekend record set by Batman Returns the year before. By the end of its first week, Jurassic Park had grossed $81.7 million, and stayed at number one for three weeks. It eventually grossed $357 million in the U.S. and Canada. Box Office Mojo estimates that the film sold over 86.2 million tickets in the US in its initial theatrical run. The film also did very well in international markets, breaking opening records in the United Kingdom, Japan, India, South Korea, Mexico, and Taiwan, ultimately earning $914 million worldwide, with Spielberg reportedly making over $250 million from the film. It surpassed Spielberg's own E.T. the Extraterrestrial as the highest-grossing film ever worldwide, and became second to E.T. in North America earnings.  

Jurassic Park's record was only surpassed in 1998 by Titanic, the first film to gross over $1 billion.