No wonder. Jurassic could become the most popular movie ever made. It jumped out of the starling gate faster than the previous box office champ, 1992's Batman Returns, smashing opening-weekend box office records (first three days' gross: an estimated $50 million). And word of mouth couldn't be better. According to an exclusive PEOPLE poll (see opposite page), 86 percent of those questioned rated the film "Excellent" or "Very good." For Spielberg, though, this success comes with a conundrum: Is the movie, which is rated PG-13, too intense for those who want to see it most?
Child psychologists proffer a variety of opinions on the how-young-is-too-young question (see box). The PEOPLE poll found that most parents consider the movie suitable for kids 10 and older. But, parental guidance or no, children and Jurassic Park have had a relationship of sorts for several months now. Kevin Baker, a hairdresser from Hershey, Pa., who brought his 6-year-old son, Logan, to the Colonial Commons 9 in Harrisburg, summed up the dilemma: "How can you keep kids from this movie when it's been shoved down your throat for weeks?"
Trailers and TV commercials have run nonstop, and a stream of licensed products—T-shirts, lunch boxes, jawbreakers and Colorforms have poured off the assembly line. McDonald's started promoting dino-size fries and sodas on June 4. And when the movie opened on 3,400 screens on June 11, the Star John R Theater in suburban Detroit held a contest in which kids could dig in a lobby sandbox for dinosaur eggs entitling them to candy-counter prizes.
In the more-than-a-movie tradition of Star Wars and Indiana Jones, Jurassic loomed like a brightly packaged, fun-for-all-ages experience. Then the movie actually arrived—and some people, parents especially, were taken aback. "It was sort of like buying a ticket for the merry-go-round," says John Swaney, manager of the AMC Eastland Cinema in Columbus, Ohio, "and getting a ride on a roller coaster."
Spielberg's 2¼-hour epic mixes a relatively small amount of gore with agonies of suspense, spooky shadows, scary sound effects—and, of course, numerous shots of snarling dinosaurs chasing kids and their adult caretakers with intent to devour. As Phil Tippett, one of the film's special-effects wizards, says, "These dinosaurs were never intended to be Barney or Bambi. They're not suitable for little kids."
But a lot of parents weren't keeping their kids away last week. Although Universal said its research showed that just 2 percent of the audience was under the age of 9, there was certainly no shortage of children, with and without their families. "The dinosaur's gonna eat the goat? Excellent!" said 7-year-old Vidal Diaz from Brooklyn. "I'm scaaaared," wailed his little brother, Calvin, 4, who soon wound up standing in the lobby of Manhattan's Ziegfeld theater with his uncle, Robert Mendez. The favorite scene of another 9-year-old, Margaret Wright of Atlanta, was "when the little boy flew of the voltage fence." For fellow Atlantan Elizabeth Adams, 12, it was "when the dinosaur ate the lawyer. My father's friends are lawyers. The movie was so cool."
Celebrity parents, many of whom attended advance screenings, eagerly joined the debate. "For my 7-year-old son, Cristopher, it would be inappropriate," says songwriter Carole Bayer Sager, 46. But Richard Dreyfuss, 45, felt differently. "I look my 9-year-old and my 7-year-old," he says. "They loved [the violence]. They thought it was rad."
Ginny McComb, 45, an Overland Park, Kans., homemaker, says kids today, like her son, Robert, 9, are "pretty numbed" to the Jurassic mayhem by the violence they see on TV. Or, as Jim McKerley, 42, a Littleton, Colo., father whose two sons, Matt, 11, and Scott, 8, attended Jurassic, puts it: "When you can see Reginald Denny pulled from a truck and beaten [by rioters in L.A.] on the nightly news, what's a few man-eating dinosaurs?"
There were no exit polls for nightmares. But most kids claimed to be surviving in style, even looking forward to Arnold Schwarzenegger's violence-heavy The Last Action Hero, scheduled to open in 3,100 theaters June 18 (see review, page 13). "Jurassic Park was very exciting," declared 7-year-old Brandi Giles of Clyde, Tex. But was it the scariest movie she has ever seen? "No," she mused thoughtfully. "That one had a vampire in it."
MICHAEL A. LIPTON with bureau reports
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
