The “slam-dunk” 2001 movie so easy Steven Spielberg refused to direct it: “Shooting ducks in a barrel”
When you’re the highest-grossing director in cinema history and the only one to boast a filmography that’s earned over $10 billion in ticket sales, box office success doesn’t necessarily mean what it used to, which is why Steven Spielberg refused to helm one of the easiest wins of his career.
Despite being one of Hollywood’s most distinguished veterans, Spielberg still enjoys a challenge. Every young and hungry director dreams of delivering hit after hit after it, because it gives them the freedom to chase their passion projects, and he reached that point in his career over 40 years.
Since 2011, only one of the three-time Academy Award winner’s nine films, Ready Player One, has cleared $300million. If you discount West Side Story and The Fabelmans, which saw their releases hampered by the lingering effects of the pandemic, The BFG is the only one that flopped. The rest delivered solid returns, but hardly Spielbergian numbers.
From Jaws to War Horse, a period that covers 36 years and 25 pictures, he’d never made more than two movies in a row that failed to reach $300m, and that only happened once, when The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun fell short. That’s why he’s Hollywood’s biggest-ever box office earner, and it’s also why he was in the position to say no to a guaranteed smash hit.
“I really believe that as I grow up, I have a responsibility to tell stories that are a little more authentic,” Spielberg offered. “I purposely didn’t do the Harry Potter movie because, for me, that was shooting ducks in a barrel. It’s just a slam-dunk. It’s just like withdrawing a billion dollars and putting it into your personal bank accounts. There’s no challenge in that.”
He’s right, obviously. As much as Spielberg loves world-building, and as much as he’s mastered the art of populist blockbuster filmmaking, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone would have been a piece of piss. Anybody could have taken the reins, and it would have made a fortune, which it did, even with the resolutely workmanlike and visually uninspiring Chris Columbus at the helm.
The books had become a cultural phenomenon, and the anticipation was so far through the roof that it could have waved hello to ET on the way back down, which meant that there was absolutely no challenge for someone of Spielberg’s calibre. He’d have easily been able to direct it in his sleep, and he might well have done, had he not dropped out in February 2000, because it was making money either way.
Instead, he knocked out AI Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, and Catch Me If You Can in quick succession, all of which were released within 18 months of each other between June 2001 and December 2002, allowing Spielberg to enter his 21st-century era with a bang, rather than a quick buck.
