The giant success of Jurassic World has prompted DreamWorks to gobble up the rights to Micro, one of the last novels by Jurassic Park writer Michael Crichton.
Micro is about about “a group of graduate students lured to Hawaii to work for a mysterious biotech company – only to find themselves miniaturised and cast out into the rainforest, with nothing but their scientific expertise and wits to protect them”, according to a statement from DreamWorks. The book was one of a number of projects Crichton was working on before he died in 2008. It was finished by science thriller writer Richard Preston and published in 2011.
Steven Spielberg, the DreamWorks co-founder who directed Jurassic Park and was an executive producer on Jurassic World, said he was pleased to have the opportunity to work on another high-profile Crichton project.
“For Michael [Crichton], size did matter, whether it was for Jurassic’s huge dinosaurs or Micro’s infinitely tiny humans,” he said.
Spielberg was an early champion of Crichton’s book Jurassic Park, in which a theme park exhibiting dinosaurs recreated from fossilised DNA falls into chaos. In 1989, the director convinced Universal to pay Crichton $1.5m to secure the rights for Jurassic Park, before the book had been published.
This year’s sequel, Jurassic World, recently broke the $1bn milestone in record time at the US box office. It stars Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt as park workers on the run from a vicious, genetically modified dinosaur, Indominus Rex.
