A Sequel to Beloved 1982 Film Classic “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial”?!? According to Steven Spielberg, It Almost Happened

Sequels are a mixed bag, to be for sure. Often maligned by the elite Film Comment crew and the like, there have been at least a handful of genuinely exceptional sequels throughout the course of humankind: The Bride of Frankenstein, The Godfather Part II, The Empire Strikes Back and Before Sunset usually pop up in conversation when it comes to film follow-ups that are as good, if not better, than the first film in the series. Of course, for those small handful of truly outstanding story continuations, there are scores of lesser-lights that do not hold a candle to their first celluloid chapters: Troll 2, Batman and Robin, Return to the Blue Lagoon, Grease 2, Staying Alive, Jaws 2 and Speed 2 are among some of the worst cinematic crimes ever visited upon movie lovers. And then there are those once-in-a-lifetime films which you pray never has a sequel produced. We all know the films I’m talking about, right? Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Best Years of Our Lives, Stand By Me, Dead Poets Society, The Apartment and The Graduate all should be guarded ferociously, lest some straight biz cat from the bowels of Hollywood emerges with a keen idea on how to franchise Midnight Cowboy or The Hours. Couldn’t happen, you say? Hey, at some more naive point on our pop culture journey we might have been inclined to agree, Dear and constant Reader, but when news starts circulating that at one point studio execs seriously pondered doing a sequel to the excellent 1987 rock biopic La Bamba – a film which had about as definite of an ending as one could ever imagine – then we’d say all bets are off, right?

From our Class of ‘44 pals over at The Hollywood Reporter comes the eye-opening news that industry heavyweight Steven Spielberg at one time had his back in a corner when it came to the prospect of a studio-mandated sequel to perhaps his greatest film ever, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.

In a Turner Classic Movies pop-up event featuring both Spielberg and E.T. star Drew Barrymore over the weekend the Empire of the Sun auteur recounted how close the world came to welcoming an actual honest-to-Pete sequel to that groundbreaking (and tear-inducing) family science fiction film. This near-scrape with mediocrity ultimately steered Spielberg’s thinking on putting a so-called ‘freeze’ on the sequel rights to future works. Perhaps by that point, the abysmal follow-up films to his first genuine blockbuster Jaws were keeping him up late at night in constant fear of what they had in store for other hit films he had helmed such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

“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,” Spielberg revealed to a rapt NYC audience who had shown up to check out a TCM showing of E.T. “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.”

As for his aversion to jumping back behind the driver’s seat for further adventures of Elliot and his good pal E.T., Spielberg’s reasoning for not doing a second chapter in the story makes absolute sense: “I just did not want to make a sequel. 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 and see how E.T. lived. But it was better as a novel than I think it would have been as a film.”

But how did one of the Saving Private Ryan director’s child actors – namely Drew Barrymore who was all of eight at the time – react to having one of her most formative filmmaking experiences denied a second act? Pretty reasonably, according to the actress turned daytime talk show host.

“I remember you saying, ‘We are not making a sequel to E.T.’ I think I was eight. I remember being like, ‘OK, that’s a bummer, but I totally get it,’” Barrymore recalled to Spielberg. “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.”

For our part? Sometimes you just can’t improve upon perfection. And, though we absolutely count E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial as an all-time favorite, we’re very grateful that any continuation of a storyline for those characters can only exist in our own head canon.