The Steven Spielberg Sci-Fi Thriller Epic We’ll Never Get To See
Steven Spielberg has made a lot of classic films over the years, including plenty of all-time great sci-fi movies like ET the Extra-Terrestrial and Minority Report. He also has made some incredible war films like Saving Private Ryan, which makes it all the more disappointing to learn that we missed out on Spielberg directing a combination of these two genres with the now-defunct Robopocalypse adaptation.
Steven Spielberg apparently had a cast in place for Robopocalypse, with Chris Hemsworth, Anne Hathaway, and Ben Whishaw all being offered roles for the proposed film adaptation.
Robopocalypse is a science fiction novel by Daniel H. Wilson that portrays a childlike AI who takes control of all the robots that humanity depends on and turns them against us. Shortly after the release of the novel, Steven Spielberg signed on to direct a film adaptation of Robopocalypse with Drew Goddard on board to write the screenplay. The production even went as far as hiring production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas to work on creating the visual tone for the film and conceptualizing certain elements.
In 2018, the directing duties for the film were shifted to Michael Bay.
Walt Disney Motion Pictures greenlit the film for a July 3, 2013 release, so the Steven Spielberg-directed Robopocalypse adaptation was well on its way. Canada was then chosen as a filming location, with the production costs expected to be around $200 million. However, the release date for the film ended up getting delayed to April 25, 2014 due to scheduling conflicts, production budgets, and issues with the script.
Steven Spielberg even apparently had a cast in place for Robopocalypse, with Chris Hemsworth, Anne Hathaway, and Ben Whishaw all being offered roles for the proposed film adaptation. However, in January 2013, Dreamworks (one of the financiers of the film) announced that Spielberg was putting the film on hold indefinitely. The announcement was also made that Spielberg was starting a new script and that the delay was estimated to be six to eight months.
However, the delays for the film wouldn’t end there. Steven Spielberg had plenty of other projects on his plate other than Robopocalypse, so he had to continually delay the project due to scheduling conflicts. Eventually, in 2018, the directing duties for the film were shifted to Michael Bay. Of course, this would likely have made the film adaptation very different from one that Spielberg would have directed, but at least audiencegoers would have some sort of adaptation to look forward to.
Steven Spielberg signed on to direct a film adaptation of Robopocalypse with Drew Goddard on board to write the screenplay.
However, there has been no further news about the film since Steven Spielberg left the director’s chair, so it seems like Robopocalypse will forever be a big ‘what-if’ in cinematic history. When the project first started, Spielberg even said he envisioned the film as “Saving Private Ryan with robots,” so it’s especially disappointing that we’ll never see this vision brought to life.
While the studios undoubtedly still have the rights to make this film, it’s rare that we see a film escape a ten-year-plus cycle of development limbo.
Fortunately, we still have plenty of sci-fi epics from Steven Spielberg, but Robopocalyse is definitely the one that got away. Who knows, maybe one day Spielberg will get bored and pull it out of the scrap pile. It’s unlikely, but we can always hope.
