Director Steven Spielberg has revealed he battled to prevent a sequel to ET the Extra-Terrestrial being made, calling it a “real hard-fought victory.”
The beloved family sci-fi film became the highest-grossing movie of all time when it was released in 1982. It held the record until the 1990s when it was overtaken by Spielberg’s own Jurassic Park, which has spawned a whole franchise worth of sequels and reboots.
However, the 78-year-old Oscar-winning filmmaker said during an appearance at the TCM Classic Film Festival in New York that he only briefly considered making a follow-up to ET.
“I just did not want to make a sequel,” he said, per The Hollywood Reporter. “I flirted with it for a little bit — just a little bit to see if I [could] think of a story — and the only thing I could think about was a book that was written by somebody that wrote the book for it called The Green Planet, which was all going to take place at ET’s home. We were all going to be able to go to ET’s home and see how ET lived. But it was better as a novel than I think it would have been as a film.”
He explained that he had to fight the studio not to make a sequel, as he didn’t hold all the rights to the film.
“That was a real hard-fought victory because I didn’t have any rights,” he said. “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.”
Spielberg’s appearance at the festival saw him in conversation with Drew Barrymore, who appeared in ET as a child star. She recalled the director explaining to her at the time that he had no intention of making a follow-up film.
“I remember you saying, ‘We are not making a sequel to ET‘ I think I was eight,” said Barrymore. “I remember being like, ‘OK, that’s a bummer, but I totally get it.’ I thought it was a smart choice. I very much understand it. Where do we go from here? They’re just going to compare it to the first and leave something that’s perfect alone in isolation open to scrutiny. It made so much sense.”
Spielberg has previously revealed that ET was inspired by his own parents’ divorce.
