The reason ‘Jurassic Park’ devolved as a franchise? It never learned its own lessons.

During my latest revisit of 1993’s Jurassic Park, I was struck by this thought: You can learn everything you ever need to know about blockbuster filmmaking just by watching this movie. From its technical wizardry — which almost seamlessly blends…

Why Critics Hate the Movies You Love

The following is an edited transcript of the video essay above. You can subscribe to Jon in Theory by clicking here. When you think about a big-budget, blockbuster Hollywood movie, what comes to mind? For me, I immediately picture the…

Movie Review: ‘Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom’ leaves little to the imagination

Jurassic Park broke new ground by shifting the limits of possibility in the world of cinema, but it also established a formula that has remained virtually untouched since 1993, a formula embraced wholeheartedly by moviegoers who made Jurassic World the…

Directors of Cinema Episode 10: Steven Spielberg

Welcome to a historic episode of Directors of Cinema….at least from a numerical standpoint. To celebrate our 10th episode, we discussed the one and only Steven Spielberg. Although the topic was motivated by the recent release of The BFG, Spielberg…

Everybody Loves Jeff Goldblum

One of the most interesting aspects of the marketing for this weekend’s big blockbuster movie, Independence Day: Resurgence has to be who the star of this sequel seems to have become. Without Will Smith’s return (Roland Emmerich choose to kill…

Three Successful Movie-Based Games to Play Online Today

We all know that movies and video games often go hand in hand. We’ve seen blockbusters and failures inspired by popular video games (think Mortal Kombat, DOA, Hitman and the Resident Evil series), and countless examples the other way around.…

HoloGrid: Monster Battle Launches Kickstarter

In celebration of the official “Star Wars” day of the year, May the 4th, film industry veteran Phil Tippett, an Oscar-winning animation supervisor that gave us the magical effects in Jurassic Park, Robocop, and most recently The Force Awakens, has…