How Jurassic World became the biggest global premiere in history

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Despite being all but extinct for 14 years, the Jurassic Park franchise roared back to life with an astounding $511.8-million (U.S.) at the worldwide box office this past weekend, the highest global premiere in history.

Not only was Jurassic World the first film to earn more than $500-million in one weekend, but it was also the second-largest North American opening of all time ($204.6-million), narrowly falling behind the first The Avengers ($207.4-million). But how did Universal Pictures pull off such a spectacular cinematic resurrection? Below are five reasons why dinosaurs are ruling the Earth once again.

Everything old is new again

As Hollywood has proven time and again, there is no marketing tool more powerful than nostalgia. All it takes is a cursory glance at the past few months' worth of entertainment headlines to realize the power (re: profit) of reliving the past: The X-Files, Full House, Big Trouble in Little China, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Twin Peaks, and on and on it goes.

Appealing to audiences' younger selves is not a new practice, just a refined one. Take the Indiana Jones franchise, for example. The series was largely a riff on the serialized action-adventure tales that director Steven Spielberg and his fellow Boomers grew up with in the '50s and '60s – it was just repackaged for his now-adult contemporaries, giving audiences a taste of the old with the gloss of the new.

Now, though, instead of trying to replicate a cinematic era or rework a genre's tropes into an original property, Hollywood is content with revisiting the exact same brand over and over again – and audiences are thankful for the opportunity to relive the glory days of their youth (or those days that involved sitting in front of a screen). The comfortable, the familiar, the safe – with a little Chris Pratt polish, of course – is too tempting to deny.

Speaking of Pratt...

There's a reason the actor has been rumoured as the new Indiana Jones: he radiates charisma, and seems ready at any moment to get down to some serious swashbuckling. Pratt has the charm, the wit and the six-pack to win over audiences of either sex – just look at Jurassic World's box office stats, which saw the audience split 52 per cent male and 48 per cent female. Not even Groot can unite moviegoers the way Pratt has.

The China factor

And speaking of stars, Jurassic World has one not-quite-Pratt-sized ace up its sleeve: B.D. Wong, who reprises his (small) role from the original Jurassic Park as Dr. Henry Wu. Although he seemed a relatively benign presence in the first film, Wu enjoys a much larger turn in the latest film, and his screen time is almost equal to the film's star raptors.

On one hand, Wong's presence is a welcome bit of diversity in a film where both the lead heroes are white. On a more cynical hand, though, you can view Wong's increased role as a way to grease the film's appeal in China.

As the country's heavily-censored film industry only allows 34 foreign films to enter the market each year – and its moviegoing audience is the world's second-largest after the United States – Hollywood has gotten into the habit of doing anything it can to make its films more Beijing-friendly. (Just look at Transformers: Age of Extinction, which was filmed in Hong Kong, or Iron Man 3, which featured actor Wang Xueqi and product placement of the Chinese beverage Gu Li Duo – though those elements were only present in the cut that played within mainland China.)

Whether Wong was or wasn't a factor in Jurassic World's global thinking, the film did indeed make it into China, where it earned $100.8-million – almost 20 per cent of its total worldwide earnings.

Family-friendly mayhem

It's difficult to tally exactly how many people die in Jurassic World, but the short answer is: a lot. Yet for all the film's death-by-dinosaur fatalities, there is nary a drop of blood spilled on screen. That's the line Jurassic World's producers walked to ensure a family-friendly PG-13 rating – any guts spilled, and the film would be knocked into R-rated territory, halving its potential audience. While it may seem odd to take your kids to a film where innocent parkgoers are chomped and stomped to death, that's simply the reality of the film-ratings world, where bloodless violence is okay, so long as there isn't anything truly scandalous, such as F-bombs or (gasp) depictions of sexuality.

Chaos, refined

Remember the stone-age days when audiences had to endure the first Jurassic Park in a measly 2D format? Hollywood would certainly like to forget that era, as 48 per cent of Jurassic World's haul came from hiked-up ticket prices for 3D screenings. Critics may regularly decry the format – as it typically fails to add anything to the finished product, and because, damn it, those glasses are annoying as hell to wear – but the box office receipts prove that it's here to stay.