Was cajoled to watch the awful new (what 7th?) Jurassic Park movie and just thought about how in the era of bonded capital ruling the world a publisher like Knopf would probably never take a chance on a sci-fi book as "out there" as Crichton's original novel was in 1990. -OS
Let alone a major movie studio spending a massive budget on adapting an original sci-fi IP that hadn't even been published yet. -OS
Crichton's first novel was truly bizarre. Baby's getting eaten by dinosaurs and shit, but also had a very Mary Shelley, Frankenstein's monster, kind of vibe cleverly adapted to the post cold war world. Now Knopf would just have ChatGPT rewrite Frankenstein and set in 2025. -OS
Remember the mini elephants in InGen's backstory? That was some weird shit. In hindsight, of course that guy wrote something as fucking awful as Next.
It's interesting to me that Chrichton had several movie adaptations in the 1970s, and then a relatively fallow period in the '80s in terms of producing stories and completely in terms of adaptation. So this very big picture was a huge comeback and seeming risk, but ... Spielberg.