Jurassic Park III is a 2001 American science fiction action film[4] directed by Joe Johnston and written by Peter Buchman, Alexander Payne, and Jim Taylor.

It stars Sam Neill, William H. Macy, Téa Leoni, Alessandro Nivola, Trevor Morgan and Michael Jeter, with brief appearances by Laura Dern.

The plot involves a divorced couple who, via subterfuge, enlist the help of paleontologist Dr. Grant to find their son, who has gone missing on Isla Sorna.

Paleontologist Alan Grant struggles to secure funding for his Velociraptor research, where he attempts to prove his hypothesis they were intellectually and socially advanced.

He receives encouragement to continue from his now-married ex-girlfriend Ellie Sattler and his assistant Billy Brennan, who uses 3D printing to replicate a Velociraptor larynx.

Wealthy couple Paul and Amanda Kirby offer to fund his research in return for a guided aerial tour of Isla Sorna, claiming they have permission to fly there.

The Kirbys reveal they are a divorced couple searching for their son Eric and Amanda's boyfriend Ben Hildebrand, who have been missing for eight weeks and were last seen illegally parasailing by the island.

The group enters an aviary and is attacked by a flock of Pteranodons; Billy rescues Eric using the parasail but is seemingly killed while the rest escape by boat along an adjacent river.

When Steven Spielberg's film Jurassic Park was released in 1993, his friend Joe Johnston became interested in directing a potential sequel.

[14] Craig Rosenberg, who previously wrote and directed Hotel de Love,[15] began writing the first draft of Jurassic Park III in June 1999.

A representative for the U.S. State Department, Harlan Finch, goes to Costa Rica and meets environmentalist Simone Garcia, who informs him of a recent dinosaur attack.

[24] The island scenes would largely play out the same as the final film, although the aviary and InGen laboratory sequences were much longer and more complex in this draft.

Part of the script would involve the humans spending the night in the laboratory and making it their base of operations, although velociraptors would eventually sneak into the lab,[7][24] after Billy stole their eggs.

[24] These final scenes inspired the title Jurassic Park: Extinction, although the filmmakers decided against this name as it seemed to suggest a definitive end to the franchise.

[46][47] Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor began rewriting Buchman's script in July 2000,[40][48] while Spielberg signed a deal with Universal to receive 20% of the film's profits.

The character was absent from the previous Jurassic Park III script, so Payne and Taylor decided to write in a small part for Dern to reprise the role.

[66] Johnston said the actors went through an uncomfortable production shoot and that Macy may have simply made the critical comments on a bad day of filming.

[61] A later portion of the attack scene required close collaboration with Winston's team, which created a full-scale Spinosaurus leg prop, controlled by puppeteers.

[69][79][80] At Falls Lake, located on the Universal lot, Verreaux and his team built a giant rock wall as part of a set that would depict InGen's Pteranodon aviary.

[88][89] One scene, depicting Udesky's death, was filmed with Winston team member John Rosengrant wearing a partial raptor suit.

[69] An early script featured a death sequence for the Spinosaurus near the end of the film, as Grant would use the resonating chamber to call a pack of raptors which would attack and kill it.

[61] Spielberg insisted that Johnston include Pteranodons, which had been removed from the previous films for budget reasons, with the exception of a brief appearance in The Lost World: Jurassic Park.

[103] Universal avoided excessive early marketing to prevent a possible backlash; the studio believed awareness of the film was already sufficient.

[108][109] No fast-food promotions took place in the United States,[104] although children's meal toys based on the film were offered in Canadian Burger King outlets.

[128] Jurassic Park III premiered at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles, California, on July 16, 2001;[130] two days later the film was released in the United States and other countries.

[142] This marked the first time that four consecutive films had made an opening weekend over $45 million, joining Planet of the Apes, Rush Hour 2 and American Pie 2.

[143] Additionally, it was one of the four consecutive Universal films of 2001 to gross $40 million in their opening weekends, with The Mummy Returns, The Fast and the Furious and American Pie 2 being the others.

The site's critics consensus reads: "Jurassic Park III is darker and faster than its predecessors, but that doesn't quite compensate for the franchise's continuing creative decline.

[149] Derek Elley of Variety called the film "an all-action, helter-skelter, don't-forget-to-buy-the-computer-game ride that makes the two previous installments look like models of classic filmmaking".

Justin Harp of Digital Spy wrote that despite the shortcomings of Jurassic Park III, it "remains immensely watchable and visually impressive.