Jurassic Park is one of the most iconic movie franchises, giving four decades of theater audiences the opportunity to experience what would happen if a combination of entrepreneurs and naturalists were able to bring long-extinct dinosaurs back to life and present them to the public.
The most recent installment, 2025’s Jurassic World Rebirth, has an interesting premise: a drug company representative, several mercenaries, and a dinosaur-loving scientist visit the equator to procure dinosaur blood that would aid in the development of a new heart drug. During the chase of a particularly scary—and angry—dinosaur, the scientist asks if the drug will be priced so high that “99% of the population can’t afford it.”
As a lifelong Movement Conservative, my first instinct was to groan at this blatant attempt to insert “woke” into what is otherwise a fun, and very exciting movie to watch. But as I drove away from the theater, it hit me how the film’s writers actually made one of the most important points that most real-life drug companies have been trying to tell us for decades: how difficult it really is to make the life-improving, and life-saving drugs that so many of us rely on.
True, drug companies don’t have to chase down dinosaurs in 2025. However, they do face a very difficult battle to create new products. This begins with the constant work—and money—required to assemble and maintain the staff capable of developing and testing the wide range of molecules that might have a positive impact on the various ailments that afflict the human body. From there, a prescription drug manufacturer must be able to keep the money flowing to support the day-to-day efforts of this staff. This is no easy feat when a drug has not reached the trial stage and no revenue can be earned.
As its name implies, the trial stage can be another difficult period, with the combination of financial and emotional capital waiting patiently for the human body’s unpredictable and uncontrollable response. What’s more, a negative news report about a trial has the possibility of upending an entire company’s financial picture, particularly for smaller firms which do not have decades of retained earnings and cash reserves to weather a stock market storm. This means that every job, from the CEO to the researchers to the housekeeping staff, is constantly hanging by a thread.
Only after all of this comes the Food & Drug Administration’s approval process, which is rarely either an easy or predictable task. Not a single individual in that entire chain works for free, and that includes FDA itself, who imposes a greater than $4 million fee to consider drugs requiring clinical data and just over $2 million for those which do not.1 Considering these staggering costs, it is no surprise that our prescription drugs do not always come cheaply.
While this most certainly isn’t as scary as traveling to the equator, pursuing some of the largest, untamed ancient creatures, and barely escaping with your life, it is a path fraught with both existential failure and endless funding needs at every turn.
For that reason, efforts to cap drug prices and demonize those who manufacture these cures ignore reality. After all, if American companies are unable to take these risks, then we will be unable to live the lives we have come to desire.
As with most movies, Jurassic World Rebirth has a happy ending, but it leaves the door open to future movies with more dangerous dinosaurs. Likewise, while many of the drugs enable us to have happy endings to bouts of illnesses and disabilities we suffer from, the door remains open to price controls, patent seizures, or other adverse actions by elected officials seeking to play politics with our prescription drugs.
Just like the safest course of action in Jurassic World Rebirth would have been to leave the dinosaurs alone, the political class should leave drug manufacturers alone to recover their costs and generate profits that lead to more life-saving and life-improving products that will continue to better our lives.
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