The 1984 sci-fi movie Steven Spielberg was banned from remaking: “He couldn’t get the rights”
Aliens are to Steven Spielberg what wood is to a woodpecker: His bread and butter, the stone to his cherry, the bark to his bite. The pair exists in mostly perfect harmony.
Spielberg, undeniably one of the biggest film titans operating in the current day, is also one of the most decorated, too: He has the most ‘Best Picture’ nominations in Oscar history. His most beloved movies, by the industry and the casual popcorn-cruncher, often detail extraterrestrial life, with 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind or 1982’s ET the Extra-Terrestrial being the most evident, resonant, and benevolent.
With all this in mind, the casual culture observer might expect Spielberg to have his pick of any and every kind of sci-fi story going, especially ones that hang on extraterrestrial existence as their central theme. You’d be poorly mistaken.
It was hardly an issue when Star Wars stand-alone writer Gary Whitta and director-cum-actor Seth Rogen were barred from acquiring the rights to The Last Starfighter. But when Rogen revealed that not even Spielberg could get his hands anywhere near the piece, sci-fi fans started paying attention. What could possibly be the reason?
“Spielberg himself told me he couldn’t get the rights after I told him how long I’d tried,” Rogen shared on X in 2014, amidst a discussion regarding his own desire to remake the sci-fi classic. He added separately, “The original writer [Jonathan R Betuel] has the rights and won’t budge from what I hear.”
What’s so good about The Last Starfighter, anyway… Sounds like a whole lot of work for your run-of-the-mill alien story – aren’t there plenty of sci-fi movies around that blend alien existence with video-game aesthetics (cough cough, 2019’s Alita: Battle Angel)?
Turns out, Rogen, Whitta, and Spielberg were onto something: The Last Starfighter provides the perfect material for a remake that feels so naturally close to our pop culture moment… The original 1984 classic follows Alex Rogan, a typical teenage lead wishing for a new life from a trailer park, who achieves the highest score on the arcade game Starfighter.
It mightn’t be much to brag about, but Rogan unknowingly passed a real-life aptitude test designed to recruit the best and brightest pilots for an interstellar war. Rogan is told this shocking information by the game’s eccentric inventor, Centauri, who flies the wide-eyed kid off in a flying saucer to the planet Rylos.
From there, the mission is simple: The pair leave behind a duplicate of the teenager, known as Beta Alex, and the real video game connoisseur must save The Star League, which is at war with the Ko-Dan Empire, led by the evil Xur.
As you might expect, the 1984 version, featuring Lance Guest, Robert Preston, and Catherine Mary Stewart, suffered from poor, glitchy graphics and sticky makeup looks, but had enough heart to draw in leagues of fans who still, to this day, discuss their love for Betuel’s mythical alien world. But if even Spielberg can’t worm his way into the story, there’s no hope for a glitzy modern-day remake… We might not know a lot about the enigmatic Betuel, but there’s one thing for sure: He’s one stubborn guy.
