Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for millions of years, but they haven’t always dominated cinemas to the same extent. If you study the film-fossil record like a multiplex paleontologist, you’ll find Jurassic Park outdid basically every cinematic depiction of dinosaurs that had come before it. And every dinosaur movie that’s come out since has been underneath its T. rex–size shadow and its many much-worse (but still financially successful) sequels. For many of us, the answer to “What’s the best dinosaur movie?” is always going to be Jurassic Park, but that hasn’t stopped filmmakers from returning to these prehistoric creatures. The End of Oak Street, the new movie from David Robert Mitchell that sends Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor’s suburban neighborhood back to dinosaur times, is perhaps the most promising challenger to the Jurassic throne yet.
So to mark The End of Oak Street’s release, we’ve dug up a bunch of the best dinosaur movies that aren’t Jurassic Park. Some notes before we begin. While pterosaurs and marine reptiles like plesiosaurs are technically not dinosaurs, movies featuring them were considered for this list. What were not considered were fictional, monstrous dinosaurs. Godzilla, for instance, is a made-up species of dinosaur who was mutated into a massive kaiju by hydrogen bomb tests. A humble T. rex can’t compete with atomic-fire breath (and kaiju movies are their own category, anyway). The following dozen films are a testament to the enduring appeal of the giant creatures that once walked this earth, a history of the advancement of special effects, and evidence that making a great dino feature is harder than it may seem.
Gertie the Dinosaur (1914)
The titular brontosaurus in Gertie the Dinosaur may have gone extinct about 150 million years ago, but the 1914 cartoon was a showcase of cutting-edge animation techniques and was ahead of its time. Winsor McCay, the legendary cartoonist behind Little Nemo in Slumberland, was also one of the fathers of animation. Gertie, his third film, was the first instance of many techniques that would become standard in animation, like keyframes, loops, and registration marks.
While the technical advancements in Gertie are impressive, the dino herself is its real star. The 12-minute short follows McCay (in live-action) as he boasts to big wigs at the American Museum of Natural History that he can bring a dinosaur back to life. He does so by drawing the long-necked dinosaur, and he instructs Gertie to perform tricks. Gertie, though, loves drama. The short has her chomp down on an entire tree, antagonize a woolly mammoth, cheekily disobey McCay’s commands, and lie down to take a little nap. Rather than be a mindless reptilian beast from ancient times, Gertie has personality. Dinosaurs would appear as caveman-eating threats in plenty of films to come; it’s notable that one of the first onscreen was fun.
The Lost World (1925)
The first Jurassic Park sequel borrowed its subtitle and only the loosest of plot inspiration from Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel. This 1925 silent film adaptation, on the other hand, is a terrific and extremely influential dino adventure. Boasting special effects from the stop-motion pioneer Willis O’Brien, The Lost World follows a semi-crazed Professor Challenger and a posse from London to a forgotten plateau in the Amazon. Upon reaching the top, they find prehistoric beasts and dangers aplenty before eventually escaping and heading back to England with a brontosaurus in tow. When the captive dinosaur escapes its cage it wreaks havoc on the streets of London, making The Lost World an early example of the giant monster subgenre, too.
The Lost World was one of the first instances of stop-motion miniature effects, and you can tell that the technique is still in a primordial phase. (O’Brien’s work animating King Kong less than a decade later is an incredible evolution.) Still, there’s a grand old sense of adventure throughout and the extinct creatures feel like living things as they fight each other and threaten our intrepid heroes. While there are some aspects of the 101-year-old film that haven’t aged well at all — including a character in blackface — the human plot, often a weakness in dino-centric entertainment, is engaging. Professor Challenger is a hoot and there’s even a love story that burns hotter than the volcano that threatens the plateau.
King Kong (1933)
Kong is famously the eighth wonder of the world, but you have to wonder why the characters of the iconic 1933 movie decided to bring a giant gorilla back to Manhattan rather than a dinosaur the likes of which nobody has seen for millions of years. In their defense, a scaly, toothy creature couldn’t convey quite as much emotion and pathos as Kong does thanks to Willis O’Brien’s incredible stop-motion. That said, the dinosaurs Kong fights on Skull Island are so detailed and kinetic that it’s almost as if the meteor never fell 65 million years ago. The standout dinosaur set piece comes when Kong fights a T. rex, a gnarly and brutal battle that ends when Kong snaps his opponent’s jaw open and then curiously plays with the broken bits.
The 1976 King Kong remake would do away with dinosaurs entirely, and the MonsterVerse’s Kong fights kaiju rather than dinosaurs. But Peter Jackson’s 2005 King Kong overflows with incredible dinosaur action and is very much one of the great dinosaur films. It’s just so indebted to the ’33 original, which simply can’t be beat.
Fantasia (1940)
Before Fantasia host Deems Taylor introduces Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” the longest of all the Fantasia segments, he explains that Disney’s animators worked closely with scientists to ensure that the film’s depiction of evolution and dinosaurs was as accurate as possible. And while there are some things that look old-fashioned, like the tail-dragging theropods or the explanation that the cause of the dinosaurs’ extinction was a mystery, those errors can be chalked up to scientific developments since 1940 rather than any filmmaking goofs. “The Rite of Spring” is jaw-dropping, arguably the most impressive part of a thoroughly impressive and artistic movie.
And it’s unflinching in how it presents the life and death of dinosaurs. We see a pterosaur get snatched out of the sky and watch the death rattles of a stegosaurus’ spiked tail after a gripping duel with a T. rex. Rather than overly personify or pull on heartstrings like The Land Before Time would a half-century later, Fantasia depicted this wild ancient world in all its wildness. (Stegosaurus went extinct tens of millions of years before Tyrannosaurus evolved, and T. rex actually lived closer to modern humans than it did to Stegosaurus. I bring this up not to criticize Fantasia for inaccuracy but because it is an incredible fun fact that should be shared at any opportunity.)
Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955)
To watch this ’50s Czechoslovak film is to feel like you’ve wandered into a part of a museum that hasn’t been renovated in many decades — and that’s an incredibly high compliment. The movie follows four boys as they venture in search of a trilobite, rowing their boat up a river that inexplicably takes them millions of years backwards in time. Along the way they wave to a woolly mammoth in the ice age, watch a fierce battle between dinosaurs, and get in a bit of trouble when their raft sinks in the primeval Silurian swamps. It’s an adventure, and while there’s danger there’s never a real sense of peril. Instead it’s more like being in the midst of a fantastic nature documentary or exploring a living natural-history exhibit.
The various prehistoric creatures are brought to life with a variety of techniques that director Karel Zeman mixes seamlessly, including stop motion, puppetry, and even traditional 2-D animation as herds of extinct beasts gallop along the riverside. Later movies would have access to even more advanced special effects that would make dinosaurs seem more realistic than ever, but no movie has as perfectly captured the wonder of learning about these animals the way Journey to the Beginning of Time does. It’s at once childlike and universal.
One Million Years B.C. (1966)
The first prehistoric creature audiences see in this remake of a 1940 movie of the same name is a giant iguana who hunts down the caveman protagonist as he treks across desolate badlands. This is unfortunate because the creature is clearly just a normal-ass iguana superimposed on the human-scale footage. The vast majority of the rest of One Million Years B.C.’s dinosaurs are incredible stop-motion creations from the best to ever do it, Ray Harryhausen. The legendary animator, a protégé of King Kong’s Willis O’Brien, imbued all his stop-motion creations with little ticks and twitches of the tail that made them transcend being special effects and instead appeared to be actual creatures of flesh, blood, and scale — with cunning and animal intention to match. (One Million Years B.C. was not Harryhausen’s first dinosaur picture; The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, which directly inspired Godzilla, came out in 1953 and featured a fictional, kaiju-size dinosaur called a rhedosaurus.)
Iguana aside, the dinosaurs in the blatantly anachronistic One Million Years B.C. are thrilling, especially a brutal sequence where a ceratosaurus fights a triceratops and loses. Where the movie falters is with its human characters. Or, rather, its prehuman characters. There’s no real dialogue in One Million Years B.C., and instead audiences need to follow a Romeo and Juliet–style story with only body language, grunts, and a few nonsense words to go off of. This was a motion picture to be looked at rather than deeply engaged with, and as further evidence of that, the most enduring image from One Million Years B.C. is not a shot of a dinosaur but Raquel Welch wearing a deerskin bikini.
The Valley of Gwangi (1969)
One issue that a lot of dinosaur movies have is that dinosaurs, for all their sharp teeth and claws, are ultimately animals. If the human protagonists are outfitted with modern weaponry, chances are they’ll be able to gun down a T. rex in a way that they wouldn’t be able to if it were a more fantastical monster. Some movies get around this by making the dinosaurs tougher than they have any right to be, which saps some of the realism that makes them special. Other movies pit them against club-wielding primitive protagonists, who come with their own narrative downsides.
But it turns out that the exact right era — with the exact right level of technology and skill for people to be an even match with dinosaurs — is cowboy times. The Valley of Gwangi, Harryhausen’s next movie after One Million Years B.C. (he reused some of the dinosaur models) takes place by the Rio Grande in the late 1800s. A man working for a rodeo show saddles up and discovers a valley where prehistoric creatures, like a vicious Allosaurus named Gwangi, still roam. They capture it using lassoes and six-shooters before taking it back to town where it promptly escapes and fights a circus elephant. The Valley of Gwangi is an unexpectedly fun genre mashup, one that’s of course elevated from being mere schlock by Harryhausen’s special effects.
The Land That Time Forgot (1974)
Based on a 1918 book by Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Land That Time Forgot is actually one of the better submarine movies in addition to being a solid dinosaur film. Set during World War I, the movie follows a few survivors of a British that’s been torpedoed by a U-boat, only they manage to commandeer the German vessel once it comes to the surface. The sub gets very lost and eventually ends up in the titular land, forcing the Germans, Brits, and the strapping American protagonist to become allies of convenience as they face dinosaur and caveman attacks while trying to refine the oil they need to get the U-boat safely to a neutral point. (“Should one drink white or red wine with plesiosaurus, Herr Von Schoenvorts?” asks a Brit while the Allied and Central Powers share an unusual meal.)
Unlike the other dinosaur movies that have been on this list so far, the creatures in The Land That Time Forgot are not animated or stop-motion creations. Instead, they’re puppets, and while the idea of dinosaur puppets may seem cheap or cheesy at first, there is something hypnotic about how fluidly the beasts move compared to the inherently herky-jerky style Harryhausen favored. They don’t look as “realistic,” but there is something to be gained from the fact that they are moving in-real time, and they’re pretty detailed puppets, too.
The Land Before Time (1988)
Unlike the absurd number of direct-to-video sequels that followed it, The Land Before Time premiered in theaters despite being a scant 69 minutes long. The short runtime is in part because producers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas realized that the movie was way too disturbing and scary for children and axed about ten minutes of the most harrowing footage. And yet, The Land Before Time is still infamous as a movie that messed a lot of little kid viewers because of the heart-wrenching death of Littlefoot’s mother and scary “sharptooth” attack. At the same time, The Land Before Time is more than a little treacly. It’s a somewhat flawed attempt to meld Fantasia-style prehistoric wildness with cutesy kid stuff, and it doesn’t quite work. Director Don Bluth’s animation is stunning as ever, and there is a lot to be said about The Land Before Time’s rich world-building and sense of adventure even as it can’t quite figure out the tone.
(We’re Back: A Dinosaur Story, which came out in 1993 just like Jurassic Park, is absolutely bugnuts and worth mentioning. However, there’s another weird dinosaur movie that came out in ’93 that’s better and more interesting.)
Rex: A Dinosaur’s Story (1993)
There are dinosaur movies that are concerned with verisimilitude as they bring long-exctinct creatures to life, and then there are movies that have a T. rex dance in the snow with a little girl while they both wear Santa Claus costumes. With apologies to We’re Back, The Flintstones, Adventures in Dinosaur City, and Tammy and the T. rex, the Japanese film Rex: A Dinosaur’s Story is the most wonderfully bizarre dinosaur film. When a little girl’s paleontologist father finds a giant egg in an ancient ruin and hatches it with the help of his embryologist ex-wife and daughter, Chie, the dinosaur bonds with the girl. Rex becomes a sensation and soon is overbooked doing sponsorships and TV commercials. Chie and Rex run away from home, they’re chased down by goons who want Rex for a dinosaur museum, and the whole thing feels less like Jurassic Park than E.T. on drugs.
Speaking of drugs, though quite popular with Japanese cinemagoers, Rex: A Dinosaur’s Story was a failure at the box office, in part because the studio pulled the movie from theaters early into its run after director Haruki Kadokawa was arrested for smuggling American cocaine. Rex: A Dinosaur’s Story is a fascinating, hidden gem of a movie and it’s tragically impossible to stream as of this list’s publication.
The Good Dinosaur (2015)
The Good Dinosaur is often, not unfairly, considered to be one of the worst Pixar movies. Unlike the best of the studio’s output, it never quite innovates emotionally or figures out what to do with its high concept. (It doesn’t even really follow through on the idea of having dinosaurs never go extinct; they don’t really evolve or form societies yet somehow there are also cavemen?) Look past what you might want The Good Dinosaur to have been, and there’s plenty to appreciate for what it is. It’s visually gorgeous, and the choice to frame the tale as a Western is inspired — especially when a trio of T. rexes gallop about like cowboys. If nothing else, The Good Dinosaur is one of the better dinosaur movies of the 21st century because Disney’s 2000 movie Dinosaur took a carnotaurus-size bite it couldn’t chew when it came to early CGI. That movie is boring and looks like dishwater; The Good Dinosaur has wonder.
The End of Oak Street (2026)
Every dinosaur movie since 1993 has had to deal with the 20-ton Brontosaurus in the room: Jurassic Park. There have been various attempts to distinguish themselves, like the good-on-paper idea to have Adam Driver’s spaceship from the future crash land in the Cretaceous era in 65, but most of these have failed in one way or another. Kudos to The End of Oak Street for figuring out that the best way to live up to Jurassic Park is to out-Amblin Spielberg. Starring Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor as suburban ’80s parents whose entire neighborhood gets sent back to dinosaur times as they circle a seemingly imminent divorce. Their family dynamics and struggle to survive are deliciously fun. Director David Robert Mitchell successfully makes his movie nostalgic not for a time when dinosaurs ruled the Earth but for an incredible era for blockbusters. (There are some modern touches: On a few occasions the director has T. rex or some other prehistoric beast silently approach our unaware heroes in the background in a way that’s reminiscent of his breakout horror film — IT. rex Follows, if you will.)
At the same time, The End of Oak Street is smart enough to know that it can’t possibly replicate the sheer awe of Jurassic Park. That moment when Sam Neill sees a brachiosaurus for the first time is the closest thing any of us will ever get to actually seeing real, living dinosaurs. The End of Oak Street can’t compete with the majesty of that moment, so instead it has a scene where Hathaway and McGregor chortle as they stumble upon two sauropods fucking. This is a moment that hundreds of millions of years of evolution and more than a century of cinema have been building up to, and you know what? It feels right.