Colin Trevorrow's Jurassic World short stomps online and perfectly sets up the next movie

We're still more than a year away from the release of the third Jurassic World movie, but director Colin Trevorrow had the genius idea to whet our prehistoric appetites with a short film set a year after the events of last summer's Fallen Kingdom. Co-written with Emily Carmichael (Trevorrow's writing partner for the franchise's upcoming third installment), Battle at Big Rock shows just how integrated dinosaurs have become in the world after they were released into the wild by Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon).

The story centers on a family (led by Castle Rock's André Holland) camping in an RV when they bear witness to a conflict between a Triceratops and an Allosaurus. When the herbivore is able to repel the predator from eating its baby, the Allosaurus turns its attention to the tasty (and much easier to kill) humans in what is almost certainly an homage to the T. rex trailer sequence from 1997's The Lost World.

Watch the scaly action unfold below:

While dinos have certainly become another fact of life in the aftermath of Fallen Kingdom's narrative, Battle at Big Rock drives home the fact that they still need to be feared by people trying to live normal lives. Indeed, the short's end credits are peppered with other instances of the giant lizards interrupting everyday existence: a young girl is chased by a group of Compys; a Stegosaurus causes a terrible car accident; some fishermen spot a Hadrosaur while boating; the Mosasaur that escaped during the last film snacks on a hunting great white shark; and pterosaurs snatch wedding doves right out of the air. It's all the perfect table setting for the series' trilogy capper.

And despite this being an eight-minute short, the production values weren't impacted in the slightest. For example, Larry Fong, DP on movies like Watchmen, Super 8, and Kong: Skull Island, acted as cinematographer on the thing, while ILM handled the visual effects and animation. Even Frank Marshall, Steven Spielberg's longtime right-hand man at Amblin was attached as a producer.

Jurassic World 3 (it's still without a subtitle) opens in theaters everywhere June 11, 2021.

In addition to co-writing the project, Trevorrow will return to the director's chair after J.A. Bayona helmed the second installment. Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are reprising their roles as Owen Grady and Claire Dearing respectively. It's also rumored that Sam Neill could come back as Dr. Alan Grant, even if it's just for a cameo like the one Jeff Goldblum did for Fallen Kingdom.