Jurassic World: Dominion is doing quite well at the box office despite receiving the worst reviews the series has seen so far. The film only holds a 30% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but holds an impressive 79% audience score. This critic score ranks below the previous “worst” “Jurassic” film, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which scored 47%.

Sarah Michelle Fetters, from MovieFreak.com, called the film “dumb without the fun, and that just makes me sad.”

YouTuber, Matt Donato, called it the “worst kind of manufactured blockbuster cash-in.”

Kyle Smith from the Wall Street Journal said that director “Colin Trevorrow has done something nearly as astonishing: In Jurassic World Dominion, he has made dinosaurs dull. This $165 million effects extravaganza is built atop a script worthy of a board game.”

Oof, but there was some positivity. Vox called the film an “awe-inspiring mess of a movie… it’s 150-minutes of dinosaurs, both CGI and animatronic, that will thrill the kids.”

So that’s something right?

Audiences seemed to praise the dinosaurs broadly speaking, and they enjoyed the return of the original actors Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum. There is hardly any mention of other aspects of the film, but it seems these are the elements that resonated most with audiences.

So will Jurassic World: Dominion storm the box office and reach the coveted $1 billion mark? Probably. There’s a lot of clout being a Jurassic Park movie and both previous Jurassic World movies made over $1 billion, despite the mixed reviews of Fallen Kingdom.

The film has achieved the best opening weekend for a non-superhero film amid the pandemic with a $145.1 million opening. That is just below Fallen Kingdom’s $148M and well below the $208.6M of Jurassic World. But it still means that it is on track to reach $1 billion.  

Ultimately, it just seems that people love dinosaurs. They want to see some stomping and some chomping. Maybe that’s why there are so many terrible dinosaur B-movies. There’s clearly a large audience for this stuff and when you have the budget for high quality dinosaur effects, you will get butts in seats.