The three time Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Spielberg has revealed the reason behind shelving the sci-fi epic ‘Robopocalypse’. The director shared that he shelved the film because it was on course to become "the most expensive movie" he'd ever made.
The director wanted to bring Daniel H. Wilson's 2011 novel to the big screen, but he worried it would be a "company-ender" if it failed to make back its estimated $200 million budget, reports ‘Female First UK’. He told ‘Empire’ magazine, "It was gargantuan.
It was a company-ender. It would have ended a whole studio that would have never made its money back". He further mentioned, “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.
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. The budget was so high that I didn’t want to do that to anybody because I couldn’t guarantee the audience.
I couldn’t even hope for a crowd that big that would justify that kind of a financial overreach. 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”, he added. As per ‘Female First UK’, the director went on to reveal he has plenty more sci-fi films he still wants to make and he still hopes to eventually make his first horror movie.
It comes after the director recently acknowledged he also wants to make a Western and he's got a project already in development, teasing the film will have "horses and guns" but he is trying to steer away from other conventions and "tropes" typically associated with the genre, though he didn't give any plot details.
Speaking with The Big Picture at SXSW in Austin, Texas last month, he said, "Well, I'm developing a Western. And it's gonna have horses. There will be guns. But there'll be no tropes, I can just tell you that. There are gonna be no stereotypes, no tropes”. The Jaws director has long discussed his desire to work on a Western.