This is my fan redesign for the Spinosaurus as portrayed in the Jurassic Park/World cinematic franchise. I wanted to combine the 1990s and modern understandings of the animal with its anatomy, basing the color scheme on that of a toy Spinosaurus released as part of the second movie’s franchise. I really wish the franchise had stuck with that color scheme from that point on.
For all the flaws that all of Jurassic Park‘s sequels have, Jurassic Park III has and still remains the only one I flat out dislike. Partly this is due to the rushed running length, the storytelling being even more subpar than the rest of the sequels, and what I saw as pointless, inexplicable, and not really more accurate redesigns for the Velociraptor and Pteranodon. However, my biggest pet peeve was how it portrayed the Spinosaurus.
It was all well and good to have a new, lesser-known theropod borrow the spotlight as the main antagonist for a Jurassic Park sequel, but even back in the late 90s to early 2000s, we have figured out that Spinosaurus was a specialized piscivore related to the smaller Baryonyx, and therefore would not have been as well-adapted to bringing down large prey as Tyrannosaurus or Giganotosaurus. Had the whole movie leaned more on Spinosaurus’s aquatic attributes by having all its scenes set in the waterways and wetlands of Isla Sorna instead of portraying it as nothing more than a “bigger and badder” version of the T. rex, it could have stood out more as a different type of dinosaurian antagonist, and we tyrannosaur fans would have been spared some serious grief from seeing our favorite prize fighter of antiquity upstaged by an ill-equipped fish-eater.
If they really had to have the Spinosaurus fight the T. rex in JP3, I would have placed the fight at the very end. The moment Grant and the Kirby family reached the beach on their way to being rescued, the Spinosaurus could have lumbered from a nearby estuary to attack them one last time. Then the T. rex, hitherto absent, could have charged out from the jungle, deliver a bone-crushing bite or two to the Spinosaurus after some struggle, and roared in triumph over its kill while the heroes got on the helicopters to escape. Then, even with its other flaws, the movie would have been much more passable.
On a more positive note, at least what we got instead made the ending of Jurassic World, with the T. rex ultimately managing to mop the floor with the Indominus rex even if she had not inflicted the killing blow, all that much more cathartic for me. The T. rex/Giganotosaurus conflict in Dominion was lame though, especially the implication that it was a rematch after their ancestors fought on Socotra back in the Late Cretaceous despite neither dinosaur having ever coexisted with one another back then.