In a recent interview with Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Steven Spielberg shared details about his original plans to direct the first Harry Potter movie, before later passing the project to Chris Columbus. In the interview, he revealed that he first imagined the film as an animated project. He also revealed that before leaving the project, he had a hand in many of the film’s casting decisions, recommending actors like Maggie Smith, Richard Harris, and Robbie Coltrane. He would also explain that he left the project for “personal reasons.”
Spielberg went into further detail about these “personal reasons” in a recent interview with TCM, explaining that he left the project after Stanley Kubrick’s passing. This led Spielberg, with Kubrick’s family’s recommendation, to begin developing and producing A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which Kubrick had intended Spielberg to direct. “It [Harry Potter] was going to be a huge movie”, he said in the interview. “The book was already written and was a monumental cultural phenomenon as a book. I gave that up to essentially do AI.
While Spielberg’s Harry Potter never happened, the movies that were released were as successful as Spielberg predicted, becoming one of the highest-grossing film franchises of all time. Together, all eight films in the Harry Potter franchise grossed over $7.7 billion worldwide.
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