When Scott Beck and Bryan Woods released 65 in March 2023, the film arrived to a collective shrug from critics and a lukewarm reception at the box office. Opening opposite Scream VI and one week after Creed III, the Adam Driver-led dinosaur thriller managed just $12.3 million in its debut weekend, ultimately grossing $60.7 million worldwide against a production budget of approximately $45 million – a figure that, once marketing costs are factored in, represented an outright loss for Sony Pictures. Rotten Tomatoes settled on a bruising 36% critics’ score. The consensus, courtesy of the aggregator’s assembled critics, was that 65 was “sodden sci-fi that somehow finds a way to bungle Adam Driver fighting dinosaurs.” The film was, by most commercial metrics, a disappointment.
Yet as 2026 unfolds, something curious is happening. The prehistoric genre is experiencing a renaissance of startling scale. Netflix has released The Dinosaurs, a four-part documentary series executive produced by Steven Spielberg and narrated by Morgan Freeman, tracing 165 million years of Mesozoic life. NBC has premiered Surviving Earth, an eight-episode miniseries from Tim Haines – the original showrunner of Walking with Dinosaurs – each instalment focusing on a distinct mass extinction event. Anne Hathaway is fighting raptors in David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street, a suburban dinosaur invasion film set for August 2026. And Sparke Films, fresh off the cult success of Primitive War, has announced a dinosaur Western to be funded via Kickstarter. The landscape is suddenly teeming with prehistoric life, and 65 – dismissed as a B-movie curiosity – looks less like a misfire and more like a prophetic opening shot.
The Anatomy of an Ambitious Failure
To understand why 65 stumbled, one must first appreciate what Beck and Woods were attempting. The filmmakers, who had previously written the original spec script for A Quiet Place (2018), conceived 65 as a deliberately minimalist survival thriller disguised as a creature feature. Mills, an alien pilot whose spaceship crashes on an uncharted planet, discovers too late that he has landed on Earth – 65 million years before the present day. Stranded with Koa, a young survivor who speaks neither his language nor understands his world, he must traverse fifteen kilometres of Cretaceous jungle to reach an escape pod perched atop a mountain.
The dialogue is sparse by design. Beck and Woods drew inspiration not only from Roland Emmerich’s disaster spectacles but also from the silent cinema of Charlie Chaplin and Jacques Tati, filmmakers who understood that emotion could be conveyed through gesture, framing, and physical performance rather than exposition. “We really wanted to make a movie that did not have a lot of dialogue and really relied on pure cinema,” Bryan Woods told Screen Rant in March 2023. “It relied on the performances behind the lines to communicate the story and the feeling.”
Adam Driver, whose Marine training informed the physicality of his performance, embraced the approach with characteristic intensity. He performed the majority of his own stunts, frequently refusing to retreat to his trailer during rain-soaked shooting days in Louisiana and Oregon. “If it rained, Adam’s out there in the rain, doesn’t want to go to the trailer, doesn’t want to reschedule the filming,” Woods recalled. “He was very much about embracing the elements and all the injuries that came along with it.” The production team constructed a full-scale spaceship for the swamp crash sequence and employed circus performers in practical raptor suits to give Driver something tangible to react to – a detail the actor reportedly found exhilarating rather than absurd. “This is just so fucking cool,” Driver reportedly told the directors upon seeing the suits. “This is so cool that we have some practical elements to react to.”
The Box Office Problem Was Competition, Not Quality
The commercial failure of 65 owed less to its intrinsic merits than to a catastrophic release date. Opening on 10 March 2023, it faced Scream VI – which debuted to $44.4 million domestically – and arrived in the slipstream of Creed III, which had just posted the best opening weekend in the franchise’s history. Sony had originally considered releasing the film alongside Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness before moving it to avoid that collision, only to land in an equally punishing corridor.
The marketing presented a further challenge. The trailers positioned 65 as a straightforward sci-fi action film, obscuring the emotional architecture beneath. Audiences who arrived expecting Jurassic World with Adam Driver found something quieter, more melancholic – a story about grief, parental love, and the desperate improvisations of people who have lost everything. The critical establishment, meanwhile, seemed fixated on the perceived incongruity of Driver, a two-time Oscar nominee known for Marriage Story and BlacKkKlansman, trading blows with computer-generated raptors. The film was too strange for mainstream action audiences and too genre-laden for the prestige crowd.
A Streaming Second Life and a Genre Reborn
The picture shifted markedly when 65 arrived on Netflix in July 2023. Digital Spy reported that the film became a surprise hit on the platform, finding precisely the audience it had failed to capture theatrically – viewers who, freed from the expectations of a cinema outing, could appreciate its peculiar pleasures on their own terms. The algorithm, it turned out, had been right about the film all along.
What has followed in 2026 is a full-scale validation of the appetite 65 identified but could not satisfy on its own. The prehistoric content wave is not limited to one platform or format. Netflix’s The Dinosaurs, released on 11 March 2026, employed life-sized dinosaur models shipped across five continents to guide its visual effects work, a technique strikingly similar to the practical-digital hybrid approach Beck and Woods championed with their raptor suits. The series’ commitment to scientific accuracy – consulting paleontologists for each episode’s creature design – represents an evolution of the same instinct that drove 65‘s filmmakers to research Cretaceous landscapes with climate scientists before selecting their shooting locations.
NBC’s Surviving Earth, which premiered on 11 June 2026, takes a different approach entirely, with each episode dramatising a specific mass extinction event through the perspectives of the creatures that endured or perished. Tim Haines, who created Walking with Dinosaurs in 1999, has assembled a team that includes the work of the late Jez Gibson-Harris of Crawley Creatures, making this one of the final productions to feature the pioneering animatronics artist’s contributions. The series also employed live wolves as stand-ins for prehistoric canids and built full-scale Carboniferous riparian forest sets – a level of practical commitment that echoes 65‘s insistence on tangible, physical environments.
From B-Movie to Blueprint
The most striking development is The End of Oak Street, David Robert Mitchell’s original sci-fi film starring Anne Hathaway as a suburban mother battling dinosaurs that invade her neighbourhood. The film, scheduled for an August 2026 release, represents precisely the kind of high-concept, character-driven dinosaur film that Beck and Woods argued was vanishingly rare. “Why aren’t there as many dinosaur films as there are superhero movies?” Scott Beck asked Inverse during the 65 press tour. “It’s such an incredible canvas.” Mitchell’s film, with its A-list lead and grounded family drama at its core, suggests the industry is finally answering that question.
Luke Sparke’s dinosaur Western project, announced in June 2026, pushes the genre into territory even more audacious. The Primitive War filmmaker’s teaser – depicting a cowboy riding a raptor across a desert landscape – is the kind of gleeful genre hybridisation that 65 attempted in its quieter registers, blending science fiction, survival horror, and emotional drama into something that defied easy categorisation. Sparke’s project, to be funded through a Kickstarter campaign launching 7 July 2026, signals that the dinosaur genre has moved beyond the margins and into a space where independent filmmakers can build audiences through direct engagement.
The Quiet Prescience of a Dismissed Film
What 65 grasped, and what its critical reception largely failed to acknowledge, was that the dinosaur genre’s future lay not in franchise repetition but in tonal diversity. Spielberg’s original Jurassic Park succeeded because it was simultaneously a thriller, a wonder film, and a character drama about parenthood and hubris. The sequels that followed progressively stripped away the interiority, leaving spectacle unmoored from meaning. 65, for all its structural imperfections, attempted to restore that interiority – to make a dinosaur film that was, at its emotional core, about a father’s grief and a child’s resilience.
The film’s final image – Mills and Koa gazing up at the incoming asteroid cluster, knowing that rescue has arrived but that the world they stand upon is about to end – carries a weight that transcends its genre trappings. It is a moment of profound ambiguity, beautiful and devastating in equal measure, that lingers long after the credits roll. That this sequence was largely ignored in the critical discourse of 2023 says more about the biases of film criticism than about the film itself.
Three years on, as streaming platforms, theatrical releases, and independent productions flood the market with prehistoric content, 65 reads less as a failed experiment and more as an early, imperfect draft of a future the industry was not yet ready to embrace. The dinosaur renaissance is here, and its origins can be traced, in part, to a quiet, stubborn film that refused to be anything other than what it was.
