Executive Producer Steven Spielberg Presents Life on Our Planet

Netflix has officially released the first teaser trailer for their new prehistoric series Life on Our Planet. From Executive producer Steven Spielberg and the award-winning team behind Our Planet, the series covers prehistoric life on Earth and drops on October 25th, 2023!

I was wondering when we would see some actual new footage from this documentary series, as the first trailer with footage was released nine months ago, which you can watch below.

Nine months on we have got our first fresh look at the series and also a release date. The series from what the trailer shows looks great so far, and I am intrigued to see how it will play out in comparison to the BBC Natural History Unit Apple TV + series Prehistoric Planet.

Unlike Prehistoric Planet which focused in on the Maastrichtian of the Late Cretaceous, this new Netflix series will focus on the Mesozoic era and also the Paleozoic and Cenozoic eras as well, which is fantastic to see.

Life on Our Planet will be narrated by Morgan Freeman, who is no stranger to narrating documentaries having narrated the 2005 documentary March of the Penguins and the 2023 Netflix series Our Universe.

There will be eight episodes of Life on Our Planet in total with Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) providing the CGI work to bring these prehistoric creatures back to life. Created by Silverback Films in collaboration with Amblin Television the series looks set to make a major impact on Netflix this coming October.

Alongside this new ground-breaking prehistoric series there will also be an accompanying book by Dr. Tom Fletcher. The book will be 312 pages long and feature over 200 images from the Netflix series. The book Life on Our Planet will release on the 19th of October 2023 with a hardback and eBook edition.

It is great to see more palaeontological documentary series being made, covering geological time in all its wonder. The biggest surprise of all for me, with this new eight-part series is that Steven Spielberg is the executive producer. Considering that Spielberg has taken a back seat from the Jurassic franchise, it is interesting to see him engage with prehistory once again in a documentary series for Netflix.

I hope you have found this blog post interesting. For more palaeontology content you can check out the dinosaur fact files tab, which provides palaeobiology information on some of the hadrosaurid and non-hadrosaurid ornithischians I analysed for my MSc thesis.

If you are new to the website, do explore all that it has to offer. I have spent a lot of time the past few months updating the website with new pages, to supply better science communication and more palaeontological information. You can also find all my science communication outreach links at the scicomm links page.