The five best movies Steven Spielberg never made
With over 30 features to his name, three Academy Award wins from 23 nominations, and his legacy secured as one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema, Steven Spielberg can’t have been left ruing too many potential projects as being ones that got away.
After all, he’s the only filmmaker to have directed the highest-grossing film ever made three times over after Jaws, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Jurassic Park all took the crown at one time or another, not to mention his status as the only megaphone wielder to have seen their filmography clear $10 billion in box office takings.
There isn’t another name in the game to have enjoyed success on a comparable level, but Spielberg’s prolific nature and desire to weave between genres has seen him pick up and put down a huge number of potential directorial vehicles, many of which had the potential to take place among his laundry list of classics.
In the interest of fairness, any films he flirted with that ended up being made by another director don’t make the cut here, and neither do any abandoned sequels to any of his existing films. Unless something drastic changes, though, the following five will end up being remembered only as the finest features Spielberg never got around to shooting.
The five best movies Steven Spielberg never made:
5. The Mark
As far as mounting a high concept action-packed blockbuster in the 1990s goes, The Mark had every single one of the ingredients required to become a massive hit at the box office, and it would have allowed Spielberg to dabble in his signature arena of fantastically inclined adventures.
In early 1998, the director was announced to be helming The Mark, which was set to star Will Smith in the lead role, with Independence Day duo Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin producing, based on a screenplay written by Deadpool creator Rob Liefeld. Basically, the thing would market itself.
With shades of Indiana Jones, the opening act would have seen Nazis hunting for the titular symbol, only for Smith’s protagonist to be granted the mysterious powers of ‘The Mark’ and discover that a secretive cabal known as The Disciples have passed the honour down through the likes of Jesus Christ and King Arthur, with his character the latest recipient of the gifts. It sounds nuts but also a hell of a lot of fun.
4. The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara
A six-year-old child – or lack thereof – ended up scuppering Spielberg’s plans to adapt David Kertzer’s historical book for the big screen, with Munich and Lincoln screenwriter Tony Kushner penning the script for what was intended to be his third high-profile collaboration with the director.
Mark Rylance was on board to play Pope Pius IX in the 19th-century drama, which centred on the seismic cultural shifts instigated by the subject. Edgardo Mortara was kidnapped, forced to convert to Catholicism by the church, and grew up to become a priest, which pitted religion against democracy and Italian unification in an awards-baiting logline, if ever there was one.
Oscar Isaac would have played the adult Mortara, but as the filmmaker told Screen Daily, he couldn’t find a kid worthy of pulling the trigger on the production. “I had my crew in Italy and was starting to build sets and had scouted all the locations and I was unable to find this boy upon whose shoulders this entire story rests,” he lamented. “It’s much easier to find a ten-year-old child than a six-year-old child to carry an entire movie. I was looking at over 3,000 young applicants for the role.”
3. The Talisman
The pairing of Steven Spielberg and Stephen King sells itself, but having harboured ambitions to bring The Talisman to screens for 40 years at this point, it’s probably best to accept that it won’t be happening with the legendary director at the helm.
The story is classically Spielbergian stuff, with a 12-year-old boy journeying through a parallel universe defined by danger in an effort to locate a crystal with the ability to heal his terminally ill mother. He even bought the rights before it had been published, but as of yet, The Talisman remains unmade.
Spielberg called it “something that I’ve wanted to see come to theatres for the last 35 years,” but it’s never been particularly close to happening. Why is the question, though, seeing as adapting King in a story with a youthful protagonist focused on the power of family is so far up his street, it boggles the mind that The Talisman has never managed to escape development hell.
2. Ghost Soldiers
When Spielberg tackled World War II, he delivered one of the best movies and TV shows ever made on the subject with Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers. When he teamed with Tom Cruise, they delivered top-tier sci-fi escapism with Minority Report and War of the Worlds.
Shortly after their first movie together was released, it was announced that Spielberg and Cruise would be re-teaming on Ghost Soldiers, Hampton Side’s non-fiction book detailing how 121 Army Ranger volunteers mounted a rescue attempt to liberate over 500 prisoners of war from a Japanese camp in the Philippines.
The director returning to the horrors of World War II with Cruise in tow backed by a staggering true story was a critical, commercial, and awards season bonanza waiting to happen, but Ghost Soldiers ended up quietly fading into the background, never to be spoken of again.
1. Montezuma
Spielberg has made period pieces before, but he’s never taken on a full-scale historical epic, with Montezuma carrying the added intrigue of being based on a script written half a century beforehand by Dalton Trumbo as a vehicle for Kirk Douglas.
Schindler’s List scribe Steve Zaillian wrote a new draft of the script, with Javier Bardem signing on to play conquistador Hernán Cortés, who led an expedition into the heart of the Aztec empire, brought two diametrically opposed civilisations together for the first time, and rewrote the course of human history as a result.
It came agonisingly close to happening under a different (and Spielberg-free) guise, though, with the retitled Cortés entering production in early 2020. Bardem remained on board, but the pandemic saw the entire miniseries abandoned two weeks into production. It simply wasn’t to be, but Spielberg helming an ancient epic with such historical significance would have been a sight to behold.
