The T. Rex in Jurassic Park nearly met a VERY different ending

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The Jurassic Park series made a triumphant return to cinemas this year with Jurassic World, which currently stands as the highest grossing film of 2015. The film which will likely usurp that title once its finished its cinematic run is Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy has been doing the promotional rounds ahead of the film's release.

Of course, before she was president of Lucasfilm, Kennedy was Steven Spielberg's producer, and she worked with the director on Jurassic Park. One of the most iconic characters of that film - and indeed the entire Jurassic Park series - is the Tyrannosaurus Rex, and while Kennedy was on the Nerdist podcast she revealed a fascinating story of what was originally meant to happen to the dangerous dinosaur.

"So we called the production designer Rick Carter over and we, literally right by the monitor, started to talk about how we were going to change the next scene and the entire end of the film as we were making it, so that we could keep our leading actor, the T. Rex, alive."

It's amazing to think that Jurassic Park's classic ending - which sees the T. Rex save the film's human characters from velociraptors - almost never happened. There's probably only one director who had the smarts and the guts to make that huge call to change the ending, and that's Spielberg. No wonder he's a living legend...

Images: Universal Pictures

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Amon Warmann
Amon Warmann

Amon is a contributing editor and columnist for Empire magazine, but is also a Film and TV writer for GamesRadar+, Total Film, and others. He has also written for NME, Composer Mag, and more, along with being a film critic for TalkSport. He is also the co-host of the Fade to Black Podcast, and a video mashup creator. Can also do a pretty good Bane impersonation.