AI-generated fake trailer for next Jurassic Park film shocks fans

Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Bailey in Jurassic Park Rebirth. Photo / Jasin Boland, Universal Pictures, IMDB

• A fake AI-generated trailer for Jurassic World Rebirth featuring Scarlett Johansson as a velociraptor went viral and was quickly deleted.
• The film, set for release in July 2025, will be the seventh in the Jurassic Park franchise.
• Johansson and Jonathan Bailey’s characters track dinosaurs for a mission, but things go awry.

A ‘leaked’ trailer for the next film in the Jurassic Park franchise had fans fearing the series had officially jumped the shark – but all is not as it seems.

The very convincing-looking teaser trailer, which was shared widely on X and has now been deleted, shows actor Scarlett Johansson morphing into a velociraptor – complete with fetching blonde ponytail – as she interacts with fellow actor Jonathan Bailey.

“This is insane and stupid,” one person on X succinctly put it.

But fans of the franchise can breathe a sigh of relief: as far as we know, there will be no pony-tailed dinosaurs when Jurassic World Rebirth hits cinemas in July next year. The video is all a hoax, generated via AI.

Official film stills released by the Jurassic World Instagram account to ScreenRant show Johansson and Bailey very much in a normal state.

The fake trailer circulating online is filmed at an angle from another screen, adding to the believability that it had been leaked after being surreptitiously recorded.

So what do we know about Jurassic World Rebirth, some seven months ahead of its release?

It will be the seventh film in the Jurassic Park franchise and a stand-alone sequel to 2022’s Jurassic World Dominion.

Set five years after the events of that film, Rebirth sees the dinosaurs that briefly roamed the earth once more reduced to living in remote areas around the equator.

Johansson and Bailey play characters enlisted to track dinosaurs for a top-secret mission to obtain their genetic material to help make a lifesaving drug for humans.

Once they get there – as with all Jurassic Park films – things don’t go to plan and get a little bitey.

The fake trailer is one of a number of recent AI-generated videos using celebrity likenesses that have caused controversy online.

Last week a self-described “AI educator” posted a viral thread on X to demonstrate the capabilities of new “state-of-the-art AI assistant” Grok-2.

Calling Grok-2 “insane”, he raved that “it’s the best AI image model that can generate photorealistic people right now”.

And to demonstrate, he shared a thread of short, AI-generated videos, each depicting two celebrities, one living, one dead.

But it was the choice to have several famous people reunited with the parents they lost at a young age that left many horrified.

“This is genuinely f***ed up and I think you should take a hard look at yourself for putting this into the world,” one person wrote under a video showing an AI Bindi Irwin posing with Steve, the father she lost in 2006.

“Extremely disrespectful and distasteful,” another fumed.

In August, United States President-elect Donald Trump shared AI images showing Taylor Swift and her fans supporting his presidential campaign.

In a post on his social media site Truth Social, which included an image of Swift clad in an Uncle Sam outfit and instructing her fans to vote for Trump, the former President wrote: “I accept!”

Swift later publicly slammed the false images, declaring her intention to vote for Kamala Harris.

- Additional reporting by NZ Herald