Jurassic World Rebirth director says the new sequel pushes the horror "a little bit further" than previous movies: "I was kind of amazed that we were allowed to go that far"

Jurassic World Rebirth director Gareth Edwards teases an amped up horror movie vibe to the new legacy sequel, and says he's amazed he was allowed to go as far as he did.

"I guess we sort of pushed it a little bit further on this one," Edwards tells GamesRadar+. "I kept waiting for [producer] Frank Marshall to tap me on the shoulder and say, 'This is a family movie, Gareth.' And it is. There's a lot of different genres in this. It's a lot of fun, it's a lot of good humor, but I really wanted sections of it to be scary. And what scares me as an adult now, it's a little bit harder than when I was a kid, and so I think we just pushed it a little bit harder than before, and I was kind of amazed that we were allowed to go that far."

Alongside the nerve-wracking, high stakes dino encounters you can expect from a Jurassic movie, Rebirth also amps up the fear factor with the introduction of the Mutadon, a terrifying mutant dinosaur that's the result of failed scientific experiments and is set to wreak havoc on the sequel's main trio.

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Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, and Jonathan Bailey are at the centre of the action, playing covert operative Zora, her old friend Duncan, and paleontologist Henry. Set five years after Jurassic World Dominion, in a world where prehistoric creatures are now fighting for survival, the group is thrown together for a dangerous – and illegal – mission that involves tracking down the world's largest dinosaurs.

Jurassic World Rebirth arrives in theaters on July 2. In the meantime, fill out your watchlist with our picks of the other best upcoming movies on the way this year.