Riding a wave of early buzz, Jurassic World should expect an impressive reception when it hits theaters tomorrow. However, there is one side-splitting scene that moviegoers will miss out on. It seems that one crass bit of comic relief which had our lead characters "down in the dumps" was cut due to pacing issues.
In an interview with Collider, Bryce Dallas Howard discusses an allegedly hilarious scene in which her character, Claire, and Owen (Chris Pratt) covered themselves in dinosaur dung. However, as much as it apparently worked, director Colin Trevorrow made the decision to omit the scat-centric scene, due to it's levity becoming a disruption to the film’s tension. According to Howard:
I get it completely, because this movie is action-packed and it’s exactly 2 hours, and it was more of a scene where it was funny and there were a lot of moments of humor in terms of behavior and our characters’ personalities really came out, but there’s not a lot of tension and this movie is so suspenseful and so tense, and so it’s a bit of a balancing act where you need to just figure out like, "Okay, given all these plates that we’re spinning, what’s gonna keep the tension moving along?"
Of course, not knowing the specific, other than an apparent smearing of shit, it’s difficult to objectively conclude if the decision to leave the scene in question on the cutting room floor was justifiable. Sometimes a well-placed lowbrow joke can go a long way, magnified by the apparent inappropriateness of the timing. Yet, as disappointed as Howard seems to be that the hilarious scene in question failed to make the final cut, she isn’t surprised, and even seems to agree with the move. In that case, we might venture to guess that it’s a case of too much humor detracting from the survival element that is central to the film.
However, the Jurassic Park series is no stranger to poo humor. Who can ever forget the scene in the first film involving a sick triceratops and what Dr. Ian Malcom hilariously refers to as "one big pile of shit?" Plus, the generally underwhelming Jurassic Park III managed to leave at least leave one indelible memory in the minds of moviegoers when Dr. Grant and the group hilariously leaf through a nasty, squishy, clearly smelly pile of Spinosaurus scat to recover a consumed character’s satellite phone. It's such a sickening scene that it even managed to gross-out the passing Ceratosaurus, who would have attacked them had it not been so repulsed. Yet, those instances seemed to accommodate the film’s pacing.
Thus, it seems that longtime fans of the Jurassic Park series have apparently been denied what would have been the latest iteration of a somewhat loose tradition: the obligatory poo piece. However, according to Howard, the scene was part of Colin Trevorrow’s original vision for the film, which in all likelihood gives it a good chance to wind up shoveled onto the Blu-ray sometime down the line.
In the meantime, you can expect Jurassic World, with its frightening new genetic hybrid dinosaur, Indominus Rex, to drum up more than its fair share of dung, courtesy of the hapless tourists running from the creature in sheer mortal terror. The epic franchise re-launch hits theaters tomorrow.
Though it doesn't appear in the finished film, bits of the poo humor do show up in the marketing for Jurassic World, including a TV spot which you can watch after the jump...
