While his good pal George Lucas was fond of tweaking his Star Wars movies at every available opportunity, Steven Spielberg has revealed that he has no plans to revisit and digitally ‘enhance’ any of his old films after the backlash he received for doing just that to the 1982 classic E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.
“I got in trouble for doing that,” Spielberg told Screen Rant during a promotional interview for his new film Ready Player One. “When E.T. was re-released, I actually digitized 5 shots where E.T. went from being a puppet to a digital puppet and I also replaced the gun when the F.B.I. runs up on the van, now they have walkie-talkies. So there’s a really bad version of E.T. where I took my cue from Star Wars and all of the digital enhancements of A New Hope that George put in, and I went ahead, because the marketing at Universal thought we need something to get an audience back and see the movie so I did a few touch ups in the film, and in those days, social media wasn’t as profound as it is today but what was just beginning, you know, erupted a loud, negative voice about how could you ruin our favorite childhood film by taking the guns away and putting walkie-talkies in their hands among other things.”
“So I learned a big lesson and that’s the last time I decided to ever mess with the past,” he admitted. “What’s done is done, and um, I’ll never go back and do another movie I’ve made and I have control over to enhance or change.”
Sounds like Bruce can breathe a sigh of relief…
SEE ALSO: Read our Ready Player One reviews here and here
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Ready Player One is set in 2045, with the world on the brink of chaos and collapse. But the people have found salvation in the OASIS, an expansive virtual reality universe created by the brilliant and eccentric James Halliday (Mark Rylance). When Halliday dies, he leaves his immense fortune to the first person to find a digital Easter egg he has hidden somewhere in the OASIS, sparking a contest that grips the entire world. When an unlikely young hero named Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) decides to join the contest, he is hurled into a breakneck, reality-bending treasure hunt through a fantastical universe of mystery, discovery and danger.
Ready Player One is set for release on March 30th, 2018 and sees Steven Spielberg (The BFG) directing a cast that includes Tye Sheridan (X-Men: Apocalypse) as Parzival, Olivia Cooke (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) as Art3mis, Lena Waithe (Master of Nine) as Aech, Simon Pegg (Star Trek Beyond) as Ogden Morrow, Ben Mendelsohn (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) as Nolan Sorrento, T.J. Miller (Deadpool) as i-R0k, Hannah John-Kamen (Game of Thrones) as F’Nale Zandor, Win Morisaki as Diato, newcomer Philip Zhao as Shoto and Mark Rylance (The BFG) as James Halliday.
