Legendary and definitive filmmaker Steven Spielberg has contributed around 11 sci-fi feature titles, as director, story creator or producer, to the medium. These include Jurassic Park, Back to the Future, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
One feature which was to see these two areas combine was Robopocalypse, an adaptation of the 2011 Daniel H. Wilson book of the same name, which Spielberg signed on to direct over a decade ago, with Project Hail Mary’s screenwriter, Drew Goddard, due to adapt from book to script.
Robopocalypse tells a cautionary tale of humankind’s dangerous reliance on AI, when an artificial intelligence grows beyond a scientific researcher’s naive control. The book was followed by a sequel titled Robogenesis in 2014. Spielberg’s take on the material was set to be handled by DreamWorks Pictures and 20th Century Fox; however, things halted in 2013.
“It was gargantuan. It was a company-ender. It would have ended a whole studio that would have never made its money back,” the filmmaker shared with Empire (via GamesRadar) while promoting Disclosure Day. “So, I literally decided it was going to be the most expensive movie I ever directed, and I wasn’t ready to take that on.”
“My company, DreamWorks, financed all these films, and I did not want to bring ‘Robo’ into my own company, because it would have just been too expensive for us to produce,” Spielberg added. “And then I took it out to other companies. I didn’t want to pay for it, but other companies were interested in paying for it, as long as I was the director.”
He concluded: “I didn’t want to do that to anybody because I couldn’t guarantee the audience.”
Spielberg’s latest sci-fi release stars Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, and Colman Domingo. It focuses on the fallout of confirmed extraterrestrial existence, which the government attempts to hide as a newscaster and a translator hunt for the truth.
Disclosure Day hits cinemas on June 12th.
Source: Empire
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