Many of us are tentatively excited about Jurassic Park 4, but good execution is a dubious prospect. The franchise has been gathering dust since 2001’s mediocre JP3, and Steven Spielberg confirmed he will not return to direct. Ideally, Universal could find screenwriters who are experienced in rebooting a long-dormant, creature-based franchise with surprisingly successful results. Well, we’re in luck! Deadline reports the studio hired Rise of the Planet of the Apes writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver to pen the sequel. The best part of Rise was how Jaffa and Silver treated the ape Caesar as a legitimate main character—with clear motivation and a captivating emotional journey, no less—when they arced out the story. I am excited to see what they can do with the whip-smart velociraptor.

If you’re itching to see the world of Jurassic Park on screen again, you’ll get an early opportunity when the 3D conversion of Jurassic Park hits theaters on July 19, 2013. Hit the jump for producer Kathleen Kennedy‘s comments about their goals for the script.

As Spielberg’s producing partner, Kennedy is heavily involved with the Jurassic Park franchise. She told us last December that the timeline of the sequel depends on nailing down the story:

“A great script is what it’s gonna take to get a fourth Jurassic Park. We have a very high bar for ourselves because we’re just like the audience, we don’t wanna make the movie if there’s not a reason to make the movie. So we’ve kinda created the dilemma ourselves because it was never intended to be a franchise, so there’s an argument to be made ‘Why are you doing a fourth Jurassic Park?’ So we’ve gotta find a good reason for why we’re doing a fourth Jurassic Park and we’re in the midst of working on that right now.”

I like the choice of Jaffa and Silver, though admittedly that is based entirely on Rise of the Planet Apes without any knowledge of their other work. They wrote the first draft of the Apes sequel, but Scott Z. Burns took over from there. For insight into Jaffa and Silver’s process, I highly recommend Jeff Goldsmith’s interview with them around the release of Rise.