Steven Spielberg has brought dinosaurs, aliens, adventurers, and killer sharks to the big screen, but he almost added Harry Potter to his long list of cinematic icons.
Spielberg was one of several directors considered to helm Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and was even in negotiations to do so. However, he ultimately decided against it, choosing to tackle A.I. Artificial Intelligence instead to fulfill the dying wish of his friend, Stanley Kubrick.
“After [Stanley Kubrick’s] death, I was at the funeral at his home. Christiane [Kubrick] and Jan Harlan, her brother, approached me about taking over from Stanley, as Stanley had intended, and directing the movie,” Spielberg recently told TCM. “I actually walked away from Harry Potter, which I was scheduled to direct as my next movie. I had cast some of the older actors, I had made casting suggestions. I gave it up. It was going to be a huge movie because the book already was a runaway cultural phenomenon as a book. I gave that up to essentially do AI.“
Although A.I. certainly wasn’t a success on the same level as Harry Potter (both were released in the same year), I think Spielberg made the right choice. Harry Potter didn’t need Spielberg to become a success, but it’s hard to imagine A.I. in anyone else’s hands, especially after Kubrick wanted him to take the helm.
Spielberg’s latest is Disclosure Day, a film which revolves around the revelation of alien life and those who would keep it secret. The first reactions have been largely glowing, but our own Chris Bumbray found the film a mixed bag, still very worth seeing.
“Is Disclosure Day perfect? No. There are some hokey ‘Shia LaBeouf swinging on a jungle vine’ moments, and at over 140 minutes it’s undeniably overstuffed. Yet it still contains its fair share of compelling sequences, and Spielberg’s sense of momentum remains second to none,” he wrote. “More importantly, it wears its heart on its sleeve, and in a world increasingly dominated by assembly-line blockbusters, that’s worth celebrating even if it could have been better.” You can check out the rest of his review right here. The film will be released in U.S. theaters on June 12.