UPDATE: According to an inquiry made to Industrial Light & Magic regarding these JURASSIC PARK 4 concept art items, these are not official. The ILM statement reads: Not sure where this stuff came from but it’s not from a production we’ve worked on. Looks like someone’s personal work – ILM doesn’t put © lines on our work like in those images – we don’t own the work – the clients do.

There are only so many ways that you can say WTF to this kind of news. Part of me wants to cry bullshit because there is no way that Steven Spielberg would have signed off on a load of crap like this. If it is true, it goes to show that Hollywood is capable of destroying absolutely any franchise.

There are old scripts for JURASSIC PARK 4 dating back to 2007 that feature human-dinosaur hybrids. Ain't It Cool News has a detailed analysis of the screenplay and the batshit crazy storyline of an evil corporation designing super soldiers using the genetic samples from Isla Nublar. The resulting carnage would have pit humans versus these creatures.

The Ain't It Cool News review features this summary of the hybrids: Nick 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.

Before you think this was written by hacks, the screenplay is credited to John Sayles (THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES) and William Monahan (THE DEPARTED). So, of course Universal greenlit the project, right? Oh, wait, we still haven't seen JURASSIC PARK 4 yet. And, apparently, for good reason. But, they did get as far into production as generating some concept art.

Even looking at the concept art posted on CHUD, I want to say someone just took some concepts from THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN version of The Lizard and tweaked them. But, as you keep scrolling, it just gets worse and worse.

I am all for insane movie ideas, but you can't take a franchise grounded in one reality and then completely up-end it like this. Michael Crichton's novels were science fiction but steeped in science fact, an idea that Spielberg embraced when he filmed JURASSIC PARK. Taking the story and turning it into this is just plain wrong. If the idea truly did stem from Spielberg, then I have lost a little respect for the man.