“It was a company-ender”: the 2001 movie Steven Spielberg was too scared to direct
Steven Spielberg might be the highest-grossing director of all time, with countless hits under his belt, but even he has found himself hesitant to dive into certain projects throughout his career, and in one instance, he was worried that a particular movie would be too expensive.
Yes, you read that right: Spielberg – the man behind Jaws, ET, Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan, and Indiana Jones – was once worried that an idea he wanted to bring to the big screen was just too much money. Considering that he has grossed such a staggering amount of money over the years, consistently staying afloat in Hollywood as one of its most beloved and reliable filmmakers, you’d think that Spielberg’s worries about financing projects would have ceased decades ago.
But Spielberg is no fool, and he knows that even when you’re as high up the industry’s ladder as he is, you can’t be reckless with funds. Money is no joke in Hollywood. So, that’s why he backed out of a project in 2013 that was said to be his biggest to date, cancelling the project in spite of already having cast several actors, like Chris Hemsworth.
The project was an adaptation of the novel Robopocalypse by Daniel H Wilson, which would see Spielberg return to the theme of AI and its ethics, something he explored in great detail back in 2001 with AI Artificial Intelligence – the novel had only been published two years prior, but Spielberg was keen on bringing this epic tale to life, so he roped in Drew Goddard, who has since gone on to pen the Ryan Gosling film Project Hail Mary.
Yet, there was just too much pressure and too large a budget for Spielberg to feel comfortable. “It was gargantuan. It was a company-ender. It would have ended a whole studio that would have never made its money back,” he told Empire. “I literally decided it was going to be the most expensive movie I ever directed, and I wasn’t ready to take that on.”
So, how much was the movie going to set him back? Over $200million apparently, which is several million more than the most expensive movie of his career, 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which cost around $185m. But with that film grossing $786.6m, surely Spielberg knew that he’d likely be able to make back the money – and then some – on Robopocalypse?
He’d cast Anne Hathaway, Ben Whishaw, and Hemsworth in the film, but it just wasn’t meant to be. “My company, DreamWorks, financed all these films, and I did not want to bring Robo into my own company, because it would have just been too expensive for us to produce,” he elucidated. “And then I took it out to other companies. I didn’t want to pay for it, but other companies were interested in paying for it, as long as I was the director.”
So, Robopocalypse never came to fruition, even though its exploration of AI and its threats would’ve been incredibly prescient. Perhaps someday in the future Spielberg will go back to the project, but for now, it remains an expensive dream that he, for some reason, just doesn’t have enough confidence in.
