12 Things You Probably Never Knew About E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

Part of placating Columbia Pictures after they hounded Spielberg to create a sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind was a special edition of the movie in which extra scenes would be filmed. Spielberg was given $1.5 million to create the new edition, though as well as adding new scenes he also edited existing ones that the studio forced him to rush through upon the film’s initial release, meaning the special edition was actually 3 minutes shorter than the original.

The other part of the deal was of course the ill-fated spiritual follow-up Night Skies, and when Spielberg canned the project to concentrate instead on E.T. Columbia were given first dibs on the film. They were not impressed, however, calling the film a wimpy Walt Disney movie and immediately inviting bids from other studios, though before they sold to Universal they struck a deal that would entitle them to 5% of the net profits.

In the end, securing that 5% kept the studio from recording an embarrassing financial year, as it amounted to more than any other film Columbia released themselves in 1982. The words fail and epic come to mind, and not in that order.