Marvel's Savage Land Movie Is The Perfect Avengers/Jurassic Park Crossover
Making movies about dinosaurs feels like a no-brainer. Seriously, it's dinosaurs. The premise should sell itself.
However, as the box office has demonstrated repeatedly, any dinosaur movie without the word "Jurassic" in the title has a hard time breaking through the noise. Just look at 2023's "65," starring Adam Driver. It grossed a paltry $60 million at the global box office, proving that movies with dinosaurs don't automatically bring in crowds, despite the absurd $1 billion gross of 2022's "Jurassic World Dominion." Sure, animated movies about dinosaurs, like the "Ice Age" and "Land Before Time" franchises, have thrived on smaller scales — but Jurassic Park's dinosaurs shouldn't be the only prehistoric reptiles allowed to dominate the action movie world.
It's about time a different kind of dinosaur movie reinvented the mold. Luckily, there's no need to invent a risky new franchise to pull this off. Instead, fans of comic books and paleontology alike should come together to demand for Marvel Studios to tap into some of its vast, unexplored source material.
Yes, that's right: Marvel Comics has a whole dinosaur franchise just waiting for a live-action adaptation, and it's called the Savage Land.
Hidden deep in Antarctica for millions of years, the so-called Savage Land is a fantastical jungle terrain filled with prehistoric beasts as well as human heroes like Ka-Zar and Shanna the She-Devil. "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" already hinted at the Savage Land, and the X-Men have deep ties to the region, so it's time to feature this unique location — either as a setting in an "Avengers" or "X-Men" movie, or as a solo "Savage Land" movie unto itself — and bring forth the superhero-tinged dinosaur movie of our dreams.
Marvel's Savage Land, explained
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of convincing superhero geeks and dinosaur lovers to party together and get hyped for the Savage Land, though, what is it?
First appearing in 1965's "X-Men" #10, it's the exact sort of off-the-wall concept that comics do brilliantly. Carved into the Earth 200 million years ago from an alien race known as Nuwali, the Savage Land is a specially preserved, tropical hot spot in the middle of Antarctica, which the aliens gradually packed full of prehistoric creatures ranging from dinosaurs to woolly mammoths to ancient plant life. There are just a handful of the human tribes that make the Savage Land their home, living side-by-side with the prehistoric beasts.
New lands becoming known is nothing new to the MCU, with Wakanda being a similarly unique land that was hidden for years, followed by the underwater kingdom of Talokan in the "Black Panther" sequel. However, neither of those realms came with dinosaurs: the Savage Land would be a whole new sandbox for the franchise to play with, and attract dinosaur lovers hungry for more big screen representations of their favorite terrible lizards.
As far as starring characters, though? If a "Savage Land" movie were greenlit, there's a central trio that would thrill comic book fans.
Marvel's Savage Land movie could pit dinosaurs against Ka-Zar, Shanna the She-Devil, and Zabu
Dinosaurs may be the selling point of a "Savage Land" movie, but the only way it succeeds is if there are compelling human characters for audiences to connect to. Average moviegoers may have never heard of Ka-Zar and Shanna the She-Devil before, but the same thing could be said of Star-Lord and Gamora not that long ago. Now, those characters have become some of the centerpieces of the MCU, and a similar treatment could benefit the Savage Land residents.
That leads us to Ka-Zar. He's a Tarzan-esque hero with superhuman strength and endurance. He also has the power to communicate with certain animals. Speaking of which, Marvel could be sitting on the next great marketable character with Ka-Zar's trusted companion, the saber-toothed tiger (more accurately known as a Smilodon) named Zabu. The beast actually has a mutation which makes it more intelligent than the average big cat, and in fact was the one who raised Ka-Zar when he was a young boy in the Savage Land. As for his ally and partner Shanna the She-Devil, she is the environmentalist crusader Shanna O'Hara, who makes her way from regular human society to the Savage Land as an adult and would make an easy lead character for a film.
With the MCU's overreliance on nanotechnology for suits, it could be a breath of fresh air to see these more rugged, non-technological heroes, particularly given their unique prehistoric setting. Together, these three characters represent a chance to explore new territory within not just the domain of superhero movies and the MCU, but also dinosaur cinema at large.
A Savage Land gives Hollywood a high-profile chance to change the way general audiences see dinosaurs
People have a certain idea about how dinosaurs looked, but it's probably wrong. And the MCU provides the perfect high-profile platform to forever change that.
Thanks in part to films like "Jurassic Park," many people assume dinosaurs were basically giant lizards. However, scientific evidence suggests at least some dinosaurs, including the popular velociraptor, had feathers, and there's been a recent move to make it clear that most dinosaur depictions today are "shrink-wrapped," e.g., with none of the body fat or soft tissue that living animals tend to possess. Even when the "Jurassic Park" franchise got revived with 2015's "Jurassic World," the dinosaurs were still the same, with it being explained in-universe that scientists made genetic alterations to make the dinos look more like what people expected out of the animals. No such excuse was given from the disappointingly "Jurassic-Park"-esque dinosaurs of Adam Driver's 65" – that is, when the movie wasn't making up fake dinosaurs altogether.
Kicking off a new franchise within the MCU provides an opportunity for a new interpretation. The dinosaurs in the MCU's Savage Land" could have feathers and soft tissue, which could help the film avoid any comparisons to "Jurassic Park." Plus, it would likely make sense within the series' continuity for the dinosaurs to be accurate to what they were in real life. A Marvel movie with prominently feathered dinosaurs could do a lot of good in moving the general public beyond past misconceptions into accepting a new way of looking at these mighty beasts.
The Savage Land provides a new setting for an Avengers or X-Men movie
A straightforward "Savage Land" movie could absolutely work, but Marvel could also get creative and incorporate some non-Savage Land characters into the proceedings. For example, it'd be an awful lot of fun to see some of Earth's Mightiest Heroes get stuck in the Savage Land, contend with dinosaurs, and team up with Ka-Zar and Shanna.
Using popular Marvel characters to sell the "dinosaurs vs. superheroes" hook could be a brilliant marketing scheme. For example, A "Savage Land" movie could open with Spider-Man (Tom Holland), Shang-Chi (Simu Liu), and Black Panther (Letitia Wright) coming back from a big mission, only for their aircraft to end up spiraling into Antarctica and getting lost in the Savage Land. Any technology they have is destroyed or rendered useless, and they have to fight their way out with the help of Ka-Zar, Zabu, and Shanna, while presumably teaming up to foil the evil plot of a big bad like the Pteranodon villain Dr. Karl Lykos, aka Sauron.
Bringing Spider-Man and Sauron together offers a great chance to recreate a fan-favorite meme, by the way — if you ever saw that comic panel where Spider-Man tells Sauron (who is, again, a human Pteranodon) that he should cure cancer instead of turning people into dinosaurs, well, that's from the Savage Land.
The Savage Land could be something genuinely new for cinema
2023 has been rough for superhero movies. Every film from DC — namely "Shazam! Fury of the Gods," "The Flash," and "Blue Beetle" — has underperformed, and even Marvel isn't immune, with "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania" coming in under expectations. There's obviously still interest in some of these stories, with "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3" and "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse" being big successes, but with up to 10 new superhero movies coming out a year at this point, the genre desperately needs to do weird new things to get people into theaters.
A "Savage Land" movie could do precisely that. Watching superheroes interact with dinosaurs is something most audiences probably haven't seen and never expected: it's similar to "Guardians of the Galaxy" in that way. And at this point, the franchise clearly needs to look beyond the nostalgic excitement of "Hey, here's Tobey Maguire and Patrick Stewart again" if it wants to keep running beyond "Secret Wars." Thankfully, a "Savage Land" movie offers the perfect opportunity to fix the mistakes of both superhero and dinosaur cinema to bring audiences something genuinely exciting.