Director On Almost Worse Product Placement Scene

While critics were split on a variety of the film’s elements, Jurassic World Rebirth‘s product placement was one that sparked division, and director Gareth Edwards reveals one scene was almost much worse. The latest installment in the sci-fi action franchise served as a revival continuation after 2022’s Dominion was touted as its finale, revolving around a group of scientists and mercenaries heading to InGen’s abandoned Île Saint-Hubert facility to extract dinosaur samples for key medical treatments, only to become trapped on the island with a shipwrecked family.

Featuring a star-studded cast led by Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey and Mahershala Ali, Jurassic World Rebirth continued the franchise’s trend of splitting critics, with some praising its homages to Steven Spielberg’s original and overall adventurous set pieces, while largely lamenting its reliance on clichés and lack of necessity for expanding the series. It nonetheless overcame its mixed response to become a box office success, being the lowest-grossing installment since 2001’s Jurassic Park III, but still ranking as the fifth-highest-grossing film of 2025 with a worldwide haul of $869 million.

One scene that left critics divided, in particular, was the movie’s opening, in which a scientist eating a Snickers bar inadvertently causes the new mutated dinosaur, Distortus rex, to escape and kill them while everyone else escapes due to the candy’s wrapper getting stuck in a fan and causing multiple system failures. However, as Gareth Edwards revealed in a previous interview, this Jurassic World Rebirth product placement was originally much worse, as the director shared that the company wanted the brand to be much more blatant, to which he rejected:

Confectionery companies like seeing their product in major motion pictures. [They even want] their wrappers to be the reason for the downfall of humanity. […] [The first version of the scene] looked like such an obscene advert for Snickers that I couldn’t do it.

Product placement in films and TV is generally a point of division among both critics and audiences alike. Used subtly, it can have a memorable effect that positively leads to a rise in popularity for the product at hand. If too blatant or unnecessary, however, it can have the reverse effect and turn viewers against both the film and the product it’s promoting.

Some of the more positively remembered uses of product placement have ranged from Henry Thomas’ Elliott leaving a trail of Reese’s Pieces to lure E.T. back to his home in Spielberg’s 1982 classic to Wayne’s World and Fight Club‘s satirical montages mocking such capitalistic influence on productions. Even just prior to Jurassic World Rebirth, a variety of films found themselves being hit with more and more criticism for this element, namely those of Disney’s Haunted Mansion reboot, LeBron James’ Space Jam: A New Legacy and Ice Cube’s War of the Worlds.

10 Times Movies Used An Absurd Amount Of Product Placement

While subtle product placement can help fund movies and benefit the film industry, there were some movies that just took things way too far.

Despite the backlash to the Snickers scene, it is worth noting that the Jurassic Park franchise as a whole is no stranger to the use of product placement. Spielberg’s original film memorably used a Barbasol shaving cream can as a key plot device, with Wayne Knight’s trying to sneak dinosaur embryos off of Isla Nublar in a secret compartment inside them. Jurassic World also used its CityWalk-like area of the park for various brand advertising, including Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville restaurant, complete with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo from the musician.

Considering audiences were still largely favorable in their responses to Jurassic World Rebirth, the Snickers scene didn’t seem to be so off-putting as to completely ruin the experience for some. However, as rumors swirl about Edwards, Johansson and Bailey returning for a sequel to the 2025 hit, one can hope that the director pushes back even further than he did on the new film and learns the right lessons to make a follow-up an even bigger success.