Jurassic Park: the novel vs. the 1993 film

Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park reached bookstores in 1990, published by Alfred A. Knopf. Steven Spielberg's film followed on June 11, 1993. Same island, same cloned dinosaurs, same doomed theme park, but the two tell noticeably different stories. If you know one and not the other, here's what changed on the way from page to screen.

Spoiler warning: this post discusses the endings of both the novel and the film, including who lives and who doesn't.

How the book became a movie

The film rights were settled before the novel was even published. According to the AFI Catalog, Crichton's agency, CAA, steered him away from a bidding war in May 1990 and had him weigh four equal $1.5 million offers, each with a director attached: Universal with Spielberg, Columbia/TriStar with Richard Donner, Warner Bros. with Tim Burton and 20th Century Fox with Joe Dante. Universal and Spielberg won, and paid Crichton another $500,000 to write the script.

Crichton wrote the first draft. Malia Scotch Marmo was later brought in for a rewrite, but Marmo doesn't receive screen credit; the credit is shared by Crichton and David Koepp. Den of Geek's David Crow describes Koepp writing the final script to Spielberg's specifications.

Crichton summed up Spielberg's priorities in a line on his official site. Spielberg told him that people going to the movie "just want to have a good time and they want to believe the dinosaurs are real."

The shared skeleton

The bones of the plot survive the trip. In both versions, John Hammond's company, InGen, has cloned dinosaurs for a park on Isla Nublar, an island off Costa Rica. Hammond's investors are nervous, so a small group of outside experts, including paleontologist Alan Grant, paleobotanist Ellie Sattler and chaos theorist Ian Malcolm, is brought in to look the place over before opening. Hammond's two grandchildren, Lex and Tim, come along for the tour.

The science is the same in outline, too. Gaps in the ancient DNA are filled with amphibian (in the film's explainer, frog) DNA, and all the animals are female to prevent breeding. In both, that safeguard fails, because some amphibians can change sex.

What changes is the emphasis. Crow points out that the novel is structured around the chaos theory Malcolm keeps explaining, and its message is that any human-designed system is headed for breakdown. The film gives Jeff Goldblum only a hint of the theory and puts more weight on Grant learning to protect the kids.

Hammond: from huckster to grandfather

The biggest change is John Hammond. Crow calls the novel's Hammond "the closest thing the book has to an antagonist": vain, shortsighted and eager to cover up accidents with hush money. He isn't especially warm toward his grandchildren, either. Richard Attenborough, who hadn't acted in 15 years before taking the role according to the AFI Catalog, plays him instead as a well-meaning showman who wants children to enjoy what he's built.

The fates match the personalities. In the novel, Hammond falls down a hillside, breaks his ankle and is killed by compys, the small scavenging dinosaurs that turn up in the novel's early chapters. In the film, he survives and leaves the island by helicopter, disappointed but wiser. Koepp explained the change in an Empire interview, as quoted by ComicBook.com: Hammond "dies in the book, eaten by his creations," and "it just seemed like a downer." The film's attitude, as Koepp put it: "We kinda like this guy; can't he just learn his lesson?"

Who lives, who doesn't

The film reshuffles the body count in almost every direction.

• Donald Gennaro, the investors' lawyer, survives the novel. In the film, the T. rex eats him.
• Robert Muldoon, the game warden, survives the novel too, and kills one raptor and wounds another along the way. The film's Muldoon gets the famous "clever girl" moment and doesn't come back from it.
• Henry Wu is a major character in the novel and is killed by a velociraptor. In the film he appears in only one scene. The novel's publicist, Ed Regis, another casualty, doesn't appear in the film at all.
• Ian Malcolm is badly hurt by the T. rex in both versions. The novel leaves him dead of his wounds, at least until Crichton revived him for the sequel, The Lost World. In the film, Ellie and Muldoon rescue him, and he makes it off the island.

Characters, rearranged

The kids swap ages. In the novel, Tim is the older sibling; in the film, Lex is older, and she's the one who uses her computer skills in the control room to lock the door and get the phones working.

Grant changes too. Mental Floss notes that the book's Grant likes children, while the film's Grant starts out disliking them and grows to like them over the course of the story. The film also turns Grant and Ellie's working relationship into a romance.

Smaller swaps are scattered throughout. The sick animal the group stops to examine is a stegosaurus in the novel and a triceratops in the film. In the novel, Grant is the one who reaches the maintenance shed to turn the main power back on; in the film, it's Ellie.

Set pieces cut or saved for later

The novel has several big sequences the film skipped: an aviary where flying reptiles called cearadactyls dive-bomb Grant and the kids, a T. rex chasing them down a river on a raft, and a plunge over a waterfall. Koepp told CinemaBlend's ReelBlend podcast in 2020 that when he joined, Spielberg was flipping through storyboards, passed the river sequence and said, "Oh we're not gonna do this." Koepp's explanation was practical: the production already had so much to figure out technologically that adding water would make things even harder.

Not all of it was wasted. One of the novel's early chapters, in which compys that have escaped the park attack a little girl on a beach, was adapted for the opening of The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997). SYFY's Josh Weiss notes that the aviary sequence turned up in Jurassic Park III (2001), and that a T. rex driving people to shelter behind a waterfall was saved for the 1997 film.

Two different endings

The novel's finale goes further than the film's. The survivors discover the velociraptors have been nesting away from their pen. The Costa Rican military evacuates the island and destroys the animals, with the survivors leaving by helicopter just before the bombing. Then, on the mainland, Grant learns that unidentified animals, apparently eating lysine-rich plants, have been migrating through the jungle. The implication is that some dinosaurs got off the island, and that leaves the door open for a sequel.

The film's climax is tighter and more crowd-pleasing. The raptors corner the survivors in the visitors' center lobby, and the T. rex arrives and attacks the raptors, giving everyone a chance to run. Grant tells Hammond he won't endorse the park, Hammond agrees, and they fly off. There's no bombing, and the film gives no sign that any dinosaurs have left the island.

Which one to start with

Neither version spoils the other completely. If you've only seen the film, the novel gives you more Malcolm, more Wu, much darker Hammond, plus set pieces the movie couldn't fit. If you've only read the book, the film is a lean, two-hour adventure that trades most of the lectures for some of the most famous dinosaur scenes ever filmed.