The five biggest Steven Spielberg blockbusters of all time
Steven Spielberg has been a blockbuster machine for the longest time. Known for his inimitable impact on the frameworks of mainstream cinema, Spielberg has achieved unprecedented commercial success throughout his career. Ranging from sci-fi romps to Holocaust dramas, he has managed to create profitable cinema out of diverse subjects.
During the initial years of his career, Spielberg had to work in television while trying to raise funds for his features. However, everything changed in the summer of 1975 when his seminal thriller Jaws came out. Regarded as the first proper summer blockbuster, the film provided Spielberg with the magical formula for success, but he turned down the chance to direct a sequel.
“I was done, I was done with the ocean,” he explained. “I would have done the sequel if I hadn’t had such a horrible time at sea on the first film. I would have absolutely jumped at the chance to own the sequel because I knew that when I was walking away from the sequel, I was walking away from a huge piece of my life that I helped to create, but it wasn’t a hard decision to walk away from it.”
While Jaws set the tone for his future successes, it is nowhere close to the commercial victories he achieved later. Spielberg has an intuition for commercial success, which few have, evident in his interaction with George Lucas before the latter made Star Wars. It was Spielberg who told him that Star Wars had the potential to become one of the most important films in history.
To explore the extent of Spielberg’s financial records, we have taken a look at five of the highest-grossing productions directed by him. As expected, Jurassic Park is at the very top with a gross total which exceeds $1 billion. This feat made Jurassic Park the highest-grossing film of all time until other productions like Titanic surpassed it.
Everyone expected Spielberg to replicate his financial success with his latest remake of West Side Story, but it failed to break even. Now, the director has set his sights on an autobiographical coming-of-age drama titled The Fabelmans.
He described it as “a very daunting experience because I was attempting in a semi-autobiographical way to recreate huge recollections not only in my life but in the lives of my three sisters, my mother and father who are no longer with us.”
Check out the full list below.
5 biggest Steven Spielberg blockbusters:
- Jurassic Park (1993) – $1.046 billion
- E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) – $794.9 million
- Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) – $790.7 million
- The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) – $618.6 million
- War of the Worlds (2005) – $603.9 million
