By now, Jurassic Park [1] is a bonafide classic. The 1993 film launched one of the most iconic franchises in the modern film era, and it featured cutting-edge practical effects and some pretty phenomenal action sequences. 25 years later, there are a lot of fun facts about the film [2], but one of the most interesting tidbits has been bubbling up recently, and it's going to blow your mind.
We all know how Steven Spielberg really knocked this one out of the park, but before production really got into full swing, a handful of other directors were vying for the rights to the book. One of them was James Cameron, best known for the endlessly magical Titanic [3] and Avatar. It's not just that Cameron threw his hat in the ring; in 2012, he revealed that he actually had an idea [4] of how he wanted to execute the film. Basically, it would have been way gorier.
"I'd have gone further, nastier. Much nastier."
"I tried to buy the book rights and he beat me to it by a few hours," Cameron revealed at the time. "But when I saw the film, I realised that I was not the right person to make the film, he was. Because he made a dinosaur movie for kids, and mine would have been Aliens with dinosaurs, and that wouldn't have been fair. Dinosaurs are for eight year olds. We can all enjoy it, too, but kids get dinosaurs and they should not have been excluded for that. His sensibility was right for that film, I'd have gone further, nastier. Much nastier."
Considering the Alien franchise includes some of the grisliest deaths in movie history (we're looking at you, alien-bursting-out-of-a-guy's-chest scene), we're going to go ahead and say Cameron's Jurassic Park would have been slapped with a hard "R" rating. Cameron seems to think Spielberg took it in the right direction, but we can't help but wish we could see this darker, "nastier" take on the source material. Oh, well.