The one movie Steven Spielberg was glad he didn’t have to make: “I didn’t have any rights”
As the single highest-grossing director in cinema history, it’s been a long time since Steven Spielberg hasn’t gotten his own way. Obviously, that hasn’t always been the case, even when he was a fresh-faced wunderkind taking the industry by storm.
Despite completely reinventing Hollywood’s tactics for marketing, selling, and wide-releasing its biggest movies, ushering in the era of the summer blockbuster when Jaws became the top-earning title to ever see the inside of a multiplex, Spielberg still wasn’t able to call his own shots.
He was, to a certain extent, which came with the territory when he followed it up with more smash hits like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but he couldn’t write his own ticket free from studio oversight and interference. That happened soon enough, though, which saved Spielberg from being forced behind the camera to helm a picture he was never convinced he wanted to make.
Not content with directing the highest-grossing movie of all time once, Spielberg went and did it again less than a decade after Jaws when ET the Extra-Terrestrial dethroned his close friend George Lucas’ Star Wars to claim the throne. Suddenly, the filmmaker discovered he had more leverage than ever before.
While it was announced during ET‘s initial run on the big screen that Spielberg and screenwriter Melissa Mathison were working on a draft for a sequel tentatively titled Nocturnal Fears, the director’s heart was never in it. Instead, because he’d made a massively successful event picture that shattered records, the studio was leaning on him to make another one to see if lightning would strike twice.
“That was a real hard-fought victory because I didn’t have any rights,” he acknowledged. “Before ET, I had some rights, but I didn’t have a lot of rights. I kind of didn’t have what we call ‘the freeze’, where you can stop the studio from making a sequel because you control the freeze on sequels, remakes, and other ancillary uses of the IP. I didn’t have that. I got it after ET because of its success.”
Universal essentially pushed Spielberg and Mathison to start working on a follow-up because they wanted a second entry in a prospective franchise, to which he couldn’t say no. However, after ET became a cultural phenomenon, the director was rewarded with increased autonomy and instantly hit the brakes on Nocturnal Fears. Or, as he put it: “I just did not want to make a sequel.”
As things stand, ET, along with Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future trilogy, is one of the very few timeless blockbusters from the 1980s that can be deemed safe from sequels, reboots, or remakes. It could have been a completely different story if it hadn’t earned as much money, but steering an intergalactic adventure to almost $800 million in ticket sales and four Academy Award wins significantly strengthened Spielberg’s hand.
