Why Steven Spielberg turned down the offer to direct the first Harry Potter movie

It makes sense to hire Steven Spielberg to adapt your popular children’s book, but it ends up that his ideas were pretty far out there.

Steven Spielberg has made some of the most iconic movies in history, from Jurassic Park to E.T. to Jaws to Indiana Jones. With that resume, it’s no surprise whatsoever that he was approached to direct the Harry Potter films when Warner Bros. was first angling to adapt them in the ’90s. What’s a little more surprising is that he turned down the offer.

Although he didn’t do it immediately. As recounted by Screen Rank, Spielberg spent nearly six months with screenwriter Steve Kloves working out concepts. However, as time went on, Spielberg began to feel like he wasn’t the right man for the job after all, and put forward ideas that clashed with the president of Warner Bros. at the time, so he dropped out.

And that ended up working. Chris Columbus came on board to direct the first two films, followed by Alfonso Cuarón, Mike Newell, and then David Yates, who’s more closely associated with the franchise than any other director at this point.

So what ideas did Spielberg have that the studio refused? To start, he thought the story would only work as an animated movie, while Warner Bros. wanted to go live-action with it. Hmm, while that sounds cool and all, I’m very glad things didn’t go that way.

Spielberg was also hoping to combine some of the books together rather than doing one movie per book, which is how it ended up happening. Luckily for us, that didn’t happen either, and we have eight great films to prove it.

We love you, Steven Spielberg, but we couldn’t have imagined the Harry Potter movies going any other way.

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h/t Screen Rant