We had one film release this past weekend with the potential for Oscar nominations.

Jurassic World: Dominion

With the revolutionary effects of Jurassic Park in 1993, a film that nearly made the Best Picture slate and still went home with three out of its three Oscar nominations for Sound, Sound Effects, and Visual Effects, it’s rather surprising that the rest of the franchise hasn’t been more exemplary. The first follow up, 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park, the only other film based on a novel by Michael Crichton (the hastily written-for-cinematic-adaptation The Lost World), picked up a Visual Effects nomination. It was left out of the other two categories. The third film, 2001’s lazily-titled Jurassic Park III, didn’t make any of the lists either.

It took fourteen years for Universal to decide to return to Steven Spielberg’s dino-fantasia, but without any of the original cast in tow. Although the effects were well regarded, it utterly failed to score Oscar nominations, which, in hindsight, shouldn’t have been surprising. Like the follow-ups to other revolutionary effects films like The Matrix and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, there is a law of diminishing returns and unless you’re able to improve upon the work in the prior film such as with the Lord of the Rings trilogy and recent Planet of the Apes trilogy, Oscar isn’t going to look your way. That’s what happened with Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and it’s what will happen with Jurassic World: Dominion.