8 Scrapped Movie Plots That Turned Up In Other Films

1. The Original Idea For E.T. Evolved Into What???

Now chew on this one: After the success of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Columbia Pictures were hot on Steven Spielberg to make a sequel. His work calendar being pretty full, particularly with the filming of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Spielberg commissioned John Sayles (a director now in his own right) to pen a script.

The script Spielberg envisioned was a dark follow-up to Close Encounters (Going back to his childhood, Spielberg had always wanted to make a War of the Worlds-type invasion flick, which he eventually would). Sayles called his script Night Skies. It was much darker but also blended bits of humor. Creature effects artist Rick Baker was even allotted $70,000 to begin creating mockups for the evil little aliens envisioned by Sayles’ script.

When Spielberg read a draft, he noted that the best parts of the script were between a friendly alien and a little boy. Harrison Ford’s girlfriend at the time, Melissa Mathison, took the script and gave it an overhaul. Mathison took the family friendly portions of Sayles’s script and produced what we came to know and love as E.T.: The Extraterrestrial.

But what of that Sayles script, eh? Well the premise was a group of short little aliens who come to Earth and begin terrorizing it by being annoying little, murderous, miscreants. One of them becomes friends with a young boy, and helps him fight against the evil ones. Does any of that ring a bell? Well that’s because it became Gremlins.

Spielberg executive produced Gremlins, and so much of Dark Skies made it into the film that the director, Joe Dante, even inserted Easter Eggs tipping its hat to its inspiration: a film marquee has the title Watch the Skies, which was the name of the first draft of Dark Skies. The infamous scene of the old lady being taken out by the gremlins is reminiscent of a similar scene in Dark Skies; and the main villain of Gremlins, Spike, was a reworking of the bad alien, Scar.

But wait, there’s more. Aspects of the Dark Skies script also ended up in Poltergeist, Critters, Signs, and Spielberg’s own War of the Worlds. That could go down as being the biggest impact ever by a script that didn’t get made.