Steven Spielberg beat James Cameron to Jurassic Park film rights by hours: 'It would have been aliens with dinosaurs'
The Avatar filmmakers reveals his version would have been 'much nastier'
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Your support makes all the difference.The fate of the Jurassic Park franchise almost ended up rather differently with Steven Spielberg ousting James Cameron to directing rights by a few hours.
Spielberg won the chance to adapt Michael Crichton's novel which Aliens director Cameron himself levels was probably a good thing.
The filmmaker, speaking to Huffington Post at the Titanic Museum in Belfast, revealed that any animosity he felt dispersed the moment he saw Spielberg's 1993 classic.
“When I saw the film, I realised that I was not the right person to make the film - he was,” Cameron said, adding: |Because he made a dinosaur movie for kids, and mine would have been aliens with dinosaurs, and that wouldn’t have been fair."
He continued: “Dinosaurs are for 8-year-olds. We can all enjoy it, too, but kids get dinosaurs and they should not have been excluded for that. His sensibility was right for that film, I’d have gone further, nastier - much nastier.”
Spielberg acquired adaptation rights with assistance from Universal Studios for $1.5b (£1b) ahead of the novel's publication in 1990. Author Crichton was hired to write the screenplay for an additional $500,000 (£355,000), and the resulting film was the highest-grossing film of all time until Cameron's very own Titanic in 1997.
Cameron is currently hard at work on four sequels to his blockbuster Avatar which are all set to be released between 2020 and 2025. His Titanic star Kate Winslet will star alongside returning cast members Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang.
Spielberg - who recently shared his candid views about films released on Netflix - has just released Ready Player One, an adaptation of the Ernest Cline novel starring Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke and Ben Mendelsohn.
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