“Okay, so on to the new Jurassic movie. We’ve got a great director, the original Jurassic Park screenwriter, and a cast of A-list actors for the demographic. Do we have Pedro Pascal?”
“No, he’s shooting six other shows in our window.”
“Fine, just get a Mexican guy who looks like him. What about the villain?”
“The script just has an evil corporate guy right now, pulled right out of central casting.”
“Perfect. But I meant the monster.”
“The dinosaur?”
“Whatever. What have we already done?”
“T-Rex, T-Rex in the city, Spinosaurus, domesticated raptors, that invisible thing, echolocation, the was a weaponized one, and an even gianter T-Rex thing that only
showed up for a second.”
“Okay, we need to go further. Let’s just make an actual dragon this time. Stick some devil wings on one of those lizards that lives on your screen door and call it something cool like Mutadon. Get it? Because it’s a mutant Iguanodon?”
“People hated the genetically-engineered dinosaur before.”
“But this is why we’re visionaries. We have to push the boundaries.”
“Why?”
“It’s like giving the audience Xanax. You have to up the dosage when they become desensitized. In 1993 a halfie might have done the trick, but now I need six bars to get through work without chewing my tongue off. Or them, I mean. That reminds me, another coffee when we’re done here, ya?”
“Same order with the foam and drizzle and shavings and quadruple shot?”
“Yes, and you just gave me an idea. We just to add more stuff! We’ll make another monster, but even giganticker. Put all the things in it. How many legs should it have? I say six.”
“No vertebrate has ever had six legs in the history of evolution. I thought Jurassic Park was about dinosaurs.”
“Shut your science hole! This isn’t Star Trek. Crichton is dead. We’re gonna stick his name on a school bus, dump a sack of money on his widow’s lawn, and go back to winning Oscars! We are geniuses! Oh my God, I just had a great idea: We’ll use the old Rancor puppet from Return of the Jedi, but we’ll make it look dumber. Think Rexie meets Alien meets Toxic Avenger.”
“And it will kill everybody and their deaths will have meaning?”
“God no. It will almost kill one of the stars, but when the screen goes black we’ll have it disappear and let the man swim away to safety for no reason.”
“It will just walk away?’
“Who knows? We won’t even show it.”
“And that will close his character arc in a way that makes sense?”
“Zero sense! Who cares? We all make seven figures and we get to reuse a Star Wars prop.”
“So now what?”
“Now we start writing the script for Jurassic Park 8: The Dinobots of Costa Cybertron.”
