If E.T. were made today, I have absolutely no doubt at all that it'd not only get a sequel, but we'd probably get an E.T. cinematic universe full of movies and TV shows. Even back in 1982 when the movie came out, breaking all box office records, director Steven Spielberg had to fight to stop a sequel from being made. He simply didn't believe that a follow-up to the beloved film was necessary, a point of view that I can absolutely rally behind!
So why, all of a sudden, are we talking about a proposed E.T. sequel, all these decades later? Well, Spielberg recently appeared at TCM Classic Film Festival in New York, where he was asked to recall the proposed sequel that never happened.
“I just did not want to make a sequel,” Spielberg said, per The Hollywood Reporter. He went on to admit that he didn't disregard the idea entirely: “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."
Where the first movie took place on Earth, as a group of children took in the wayward extraterrestrial after he was stranded on their planet, the follow-up would take us to E.T.'s own world. "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,” Spielberg said.
Once Spielberg decided that he didn't want to make a sequel to the movie, he had to fight to prevent the IP from being rinsed for all its worth:
"That was a real hard-fought victory because I didn’t have any rights. 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."
And E.T. was very successful. Adjusted for inflation, it's among the top 10 highest grossing movies of all time; a group that also includes Spielberg's movie Jaws, which had come out seven years before. So Spielberg had a lot of weight to throw around in the aftermath of E.T.'s triumphant run in theaters.
I for one am delighted that E.T. never got a sequel. The original is a masterpiece and it ended brilliantly. And the lack of a sequel certainly didn't hinder Spielberg's career; he went on to make more classics like Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, additional Indiana Jones films, and much more.
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