The movie series Steven Spielberg made instead of a James Bond film: “I got that beat”
It’s almost impossible to have gone through life without seeing at least one Steven Spielberg movie.
Whether you grew up loving his family-friendly flicks like ET: The Extra-Terrestrial or prefer when he’s a tad more brutal, as demonstrated by unrelenting movies like Saving Private Ryan, his films are basically unavoidable.
Spielberg makes the kinds of movies that aim to reach a universal audience, revelling in the importance of human connection, albeit in a rather sentimental way. His movies are quintessentially Hollywood in the sense that they operate on large scales, prioritising happy endings that are well-earned by hard-done-by characters. Spielberg’s movies exist at the centre of the mainstream – accessible and easy to follow, making him the perfect candidate for widespread success.
If there’s one thing that works well in the mainstream, it’s franchise cinema, which is something Spielberg soon realised as his pal George Lucas found unprecedented success with Star Wars, a movie that helped to kickstart the franchise boom of the 1980s. In 1981, Spielberg directed Raiders of the Lost Ark, the first instalment in the Indiana Jones franchise, which just so happened to emerge from a story conceived by Lucas.
With Star Wars’ Harrison Ford on board to play the protagonist, the movie was bound for success, which it soon achieved by grossing a whopping $389.9million against a $20m budget. This only buoyed Spielberg to greater heights, although he almost didn’t direct the classic action-adventure movie because he was interested in making a James Bond film instead.
Despite the fact that the 007 franchise is a quintessentially British institution, as it garnered further success in the mainstream as one of the most popular movie series, people like Spielberg were soon interested in getting their claws on it. I’m sure that the filmmaker would’ve done a good job as the director of a Bond movie, although his decision to inevitably work on Indiana Jones was a much smarter move.
“I’ve always wanted to direct a James Bond picture, and George [Lucas] said, ‘I got that beat,’ so I said, ‘What do you mean?’… ‘I have a better idea. It’s called Raiders of the Lost Ark,’” Spielberg once explained.
Sure, Bond was still a dream for Spielberg, but the idea that Lucas pitched to him instantly captivated him. Lucas recalled, “I sat down and kind of told him the story about this archeologist and how it was like a Saturday matinee serial, and he got in one mess after another, and he just said, ‘Fantastic, let’s do this.’” It seems like Spielberg wasn’t hard to convince.
As the pair started to map the movie out, Spielberg insisted on changing Indiana’s last name from Smith to Jones, but apart from that, the Jaws director was on board with everything put forward, and he subsequently went forth and conquered at the box office.
Raiders of the Lost Ark holds a much higher status in the cinematic world than any of the Bond movies, so it seems like Spielberg made the right decision, although it’s not too late for him to direct an upcoming 007 film if he can squeeze one into his ever-expanding schedule.
