I’ll be…right…here…as long as you don’t expect me to be a sequel. Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial remains one of the highest-grossing films ever, easily taking 1982 and even the entire decade. Expectedly, one was planned, although it had the pretty unfortunate name of E.T. II: Nocturnal Fears…As we know, it thankfully never came to fruition, with Spielberg putting an eventual stop to the sequel.
Speaking at a TCM Classic Film Festival event over the weekend (alongside Drew Barrymore), Steven Spielberg said the power he was growing in Hollywood allowed him to put the E.T. sequel to rest. “That was a real hard-fought victory because I didn’t have any rights. Before E.T., 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 E.T. because of its success.”
Interestingly enough, Steven Spielberg’s next movie after E.T. would be his first sequel: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. With that, it’s kind of surprising how few sequels Spielberg actually has in his filmography, with only the Indiana Jones movies and The Lost World qualifying.
A 10-page treatment for Nocturnal Fears published just one month after E.T. came out can be found online, but it’s pretty lousy. As far as the source that was most inspiring to Spielberg for the sequel, he explained, “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 E.T.’s home. We were all going to be able to go to E.T.’s home and see how E.T. lived. But it was better as a novel than I think it would have been as a film.”
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial remains one of the highest-grossing films that either never had a sequel or isn’t part of a pre-existing title. According to The Numbers, it ranks behind only Titanic and Barbie. But if we want to adjust for inflation, it’s got $1.45 billion to its name.
Do you think a sequel to E.T. would have been worth exploring? Use your Speak & Spell and let us know below.
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