Those dinosaurs are gonna need a whole lot of lotion. Ted Levine, the actor best known for playing iconic creeper Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, has joined the cast of Jurassic World 2, undoubtedly inspiring all sorts of ill-advised fan-fic ideas for the Tumblr community. With Levine on board, the cast is reportedly finalized for the sequel, which is set to begin production this spring with director J.A. Bayona (A Monster Calls) at the helm.

Most people who know of J.A. Bayona know him from The Orphanage, which was the first film of his to get really big in the U.S. It probably helped that it was a horror film, and that it was produced by Guillermo del Toro, but Bayona is still relatively unknown. That’s all going to change as soon as Jurassic World 2 hits theaters, and he knows it. Colin Trevorrow took on the first Jurassic World after his indie Safety Not Guaranteed made a big splash, and now he’ll be in charge of Star Wars: Episode IX. Bayona’s A Monster Calls is about to open in American theaters within the next few weeks, and he’s excited about his blooming prospects, saying that he’s ready to take on a big blockbuster.

By now we all know that composer Michael Giacchino is doing pretty darn well for himself. He took over Rogue One scoring duties from Alexandre Desplat after writing the music for this year’s Doctor Strange, Star Trek Beyond, and Zootopia, and it’s been announced that he’ll also provide the soundtrack for Spider-Man: Homecoming, War for the Planet of the Apes, and The Incredibles 2. Now, a small throwaway line from a recent interview tells us that, yes, he’ll be returning to Isla Nublar to score Jurassic World 2.

Baz Luhrmann’s The Get Down was Netflix’s most luxuriously expensive show to date, but didn’t make as many waves during its premiere as it was probably meant to, the buzz trickling away pretty quickly after Part 1 was released earlier this fall. But it did rocket its star, Justice Smith, into the spotlight, as he’s now been cast in J. A. Bayona’s Jurassic World sequel.

Jurassic World promised a return, for better or worse, to Steven Spielberg and Michael Crichton’s original island full of genetically engineered living fossils, and the film had one of the biggest openings in box office history. Audiences returned to the park in droves, and the film gifted us with a few unexpected returns of its own. Our beloved Tyrannosaurus rex was featured in arguably the coolest shot of the entire movie when Bryce Dallas Howard’s Claire Dearing lures it out of its paddock with a lit flare, and B.D. Wong reprised his role as Dr. Henry Wu, the biologist who engineered the dinosaurs for Hammond in the original Jurassic Park. He left the park at the end of Jurassic World as the dinosaurs ran rampant, but the movie’s executive producer says that might not be the last we see of him.

One of the peculiarities of the modern studio system is that we often know the date a movie will be released long before we know the date when a movie will actually go into production. For example, we’ve known since last year that Jurassic World 2 would be released in June of 2018, but here it is, the end of 2016, and we’re just now learning the timeline to actually make the darn thing. Production schedules, like box office gross, sometimes have a logic all their own.

It looks like Universal and Amblin are finally gearing up to head into production on the Jurassic World sequel, as casting has officially begun for the follow-up to Colin Trevorrow’s hit blockbuster. In addition to returning stars Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard (hopefully sans high heels this time), Toby Jones and Rafe Spall are being eyed for supporting roles, while the studio is reportedly looking to test actors for two “key roles” relatively soon.

Let’s get this on the record: I am not a very big fan of Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World. Too many of the characters seemed to be vague recreations of people from the first Jurassic Park movie; with nobody there for audiences to really connect with, the film feels more like a disjointed series of dinosaur set pieces than a truly engaging story. That being said, my wife loves every movie in the Jurassic Park franchise, so I will happily continue to see them with her until we find a way to actually clone dinosaurs and they wipe us off the face of the earth. There is no such thing as a bad movie dat

We’ve gotten tons of information about the vague feel of J.A. Bayona’s Jurassic World 2 — it’ll deal, metaphorically, with the modern-day treatment of animals — but we haven’t heard much about the actual plot. Today, though, it sounds like Universal is finally getting the ball rolling with news of an open casting call for a child actor. Jurassic World attempted to update the franchise for modern audiences, but at least one tradition has stayed the same: it’s not a Jurassic Park movie without kids running form dinosaurs.

Earlier this year, our own Britt Hayes wrote a brief history of the times when modern filmmakers compared their movies to Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. It was a pretty revealing trend; as movie studios scrambled to give audiences the dark and gritty franchises they assumed audiences wanted, more and more filmmakers used Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises as a kind of fanboy secret handshake.