Jurassic World Rebirth is a film in which Scarlett Johansson’s character takes a job she doesn’t really care about simply because the money is too good. Does the movie get why that’s funny?
One of the fundamental rules of Hollywood screenwriting is it’s important to give your heroes personal stakes. Jurassic World Rebirth doesn’t bother with anything like that. As my colleague Alison Willmore noted in her review, barely anybody in this movie seems all that interested in dinosaurs. So what’s the motivation for Johansson’s character, famed mercenary Zora Bennett, to risk life and limb to visit an abandoned island full of genetically engineered dinosaurs? Money, of course. There’s a little bit of business about how Zora and her team will be harvesting blood from the biggest dinos of land, sea, and sky in order to create a wonder drug that will cure heart disease … and isn’t heart disease how her mother died? But really, it’s money. Zora spends about five seconds refusing the call to adventure before the promise of a $10 million paycheck instantly changes her mind. That’s the kind of cash that can make a girl do crazy things, like rappel down a 300-foot cliff face while battling a Quetzalcoatlus, which is, as the script so memorably puts it, “a flying carnivore the size of an F-16.”
But while watching Jurassic World Rebirth, one has the feeling that tens of millions of dollars might also be the main reason a girl does a crazy thing like star in the seventh Jurassic movie despite the fact that she has two Oscar nominations and a husband who works at SNL. (Though perhaps that old Staten Island Ferry is proving an even bigger money pit than we thought.) This impression is not alleviated by the effort Johansson brings to the role, which — as with everyone else in the cast — tops out at “summer Friday” levels of intensity. They’re not exactly phoning it in, but in terms of commitment, the actress’s transformation into a world-weary soldier of fortune falls just shy of her Marriage Story character’s David Bowie Halloween costume.
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Whether or not the salary beat is a sly in-joke about ScarJo’s own motivation, it’s hard not to spend Rebirth’s whole first act pondering the question of who’s making more money from this endeavor — Zora Bennett or Scarlett Johansson? The answer, I’ve heard, is Johansson, whose quote is apparently $20 million. (Coincidentally, Zora negotiates her own fee up to precisely this amount in Rebirth, but only so she can give half of it to Mahershala Ali’s character. Do with that information what you wish.) It takes a remarkable amount of chutzpah to include a detailed discussion of a character’s paycheck in a film that everyone assumes is a paycheck gig, but honestly, I dig it. In a movie that’s a safe bet to make a billion dollars regardless of quality, you could call it an admirable display of un-self-consciousness. And who knows, maybe $10 million is actually the going rate for a project manager on a job of this magnitude. I do know this: Between Rebirth and Materialists, it’s been a banner summer for salary transparency at the movies. Let’s keep it going. How much do you think the Fantastic Four pay in rent?
