The story, without spoilers
Industrialist John Hammond has built something no one has seen before on Isla Nublar, an island off the coast of Costa Rica: a wildlife park of living dinosaurs, cloned from ancient DNA. Before he opens the gates to the public, his investors want reassurance, so Hammond flies in palaeontologist Alan Grant, palaeobotanist Ellie Sattler and the sardonic mathematician Ian Malcolm to give the place their blessing.
His grandchildren, Tim and Lex, come along for the tour. The scientists are dazzled and uneasy in equal measure, Malcolm keeps warning that life refuses to be controlled, and a tropical storm is rolling in just as one of the park's own staff decides he has a better offer elsewhere.
The appeal of the set-up is that it begins as a dream rather than a nightmare. The scientists, the children and the viewer share the same astonishment at seeing living dinosaurs for the first time, and Spielberg lets that wonder play out before anything goes wrong. When the park starts to fail, the film turns into a story about how quickly confidence can become panic, and about people who built something without asking whether they should.
Behind the scenes
Steven Spielberg brought together two very different kinds of effects. Stan Winston, whose Alien Queen in Aliens had impressed him, built life-sized animatronic dinosaurs that the actors could actually stand next to. Industrial Light & Magic created dinosaurs entirely in the computer for shots no puppet could manage, which was then a new and largely untested approach.
Filming took place in California and Hawaii from August to November 1992. Crichton co-wrote the screenplay from his own novel with David Koepp. John Williams's main theme, broad and almost hymn-like, is what makes the first glimpse of the dinosaurs feel like wonder rather than threat.
Before the novel was even published, four studios bid for the film rights. Spielberg won them with Universal's backing for $1.5 million, and Crichton was paid a further $500,000 to adapt his book. Koepp's final draft cut much of the novel's exposition and violence and reshaped several characters. Filming ran in California and Hawaii from August to November 1992, and Spielberg supervised post-production from Poland while he was shooting Schindler's List.
To show off the sound design, which blended a range of real animal noises into the dinosaur roars, Spielberg invested in the creation of DTS, a company specialising in digital surround sound. Universal backed the release with a $65 million marketing campaign and licensing deals with more than 100 companies.
The creatures came from two directions at once. Industrial Light & Magic produced the computer-generated dinosaurs, while Stan Winston's team built life-sized animatronic animals for the actors to play against on set. That mixture is a large part of why the film still convinces: the close-ups have weight because something real was in front of the camera.
Why it still matters
Jurassic Park passed E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Spielberg's own 1982 film, to become the highest-grossing film of all time, and it held that title until Titanic arrived in 1997. Its earnings, now $1.058 billion with re-releases, came from a budget of about $56 to $63 million.
Its bigger legacy was technical. The mix of Winston's practical creatures and ILM's digital ones showed Hollywood that computer-generated imagery could carry the central attraction of a film, not just a background shot. That lesson reshaped effects work for the decades that followed, and the film launched a franchise that is still producing sequels.
Its first run took over $914 million, overtaking Spielberg's own E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial as the highest-grossing film of all time until Titanic arrived in 1997. After its 20th-anniversary re-release in 2013, it became the oldest film to pass $1 billion. In 2018 the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry, and the franchise it started now includes six sequels, games and theme park attractions.