Nicolai Haugsted
The master director now offers insight into the 10-page synopsis featuring cannibalistic aliens.
E.T. (E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial) is one of film history’s most beloved family films, yet Steven Spielberg has never made a sequel.
For decades, it has stood as one of Hollywood’s strangest omissions – after all, how many studios wouldn’t kill for a sequel to one of the highest-grossing films ever?
The answer is that Spielberg actually had both a story and a co-writer ready. Together with original screenwriter Melissa Mathison, he actually wrote a treatment while the first film was still in theaters in 1982, Collider reports.
The project was given the working title E.T. II: Nocturnal Fears. And it was no cozy reunion.
Elliott to be Kidnapped by Carnivorous Aliens
The 10-page synopsis would have taken the film in a much darker direction. Malicious, carnivorous aliens – mutants from E.T.’s own home planet – land on Earth, kidnap Elliott and his friends, and hold them captive.
E.T. intercepts the boy’s distress call from space, returns, rescues the children, and banishes the attackers to another galaxy. The story was led by a villain named Korel, and the ending was intended to mirror the original’s farewell between boy and alien.
It never got that far. Spielberg shelved the treatment and has since maintained that it was the right choice.
“I Just Didn’t Want to Make a Sequel”
In January 2025, he himself elaborated on the decision.
“I just didn’t want to make a sequel. I flirted with it for a brief moment – just to see if I could come up with a story,” Spielberg told Yahoo Entertainment.
He briefly considered adapting a novel titled The Green Planet, which took place on E.T.’s home world, but concluded, according to the same source, that the story worked better as a book than as a film.
The director has never hidden that his reluctance was also an artistic defense of the original film. Already during a conversation at the American Film Institute in 2012, he explained that “a sequel to E.T. would do nothing but rob the original of its innocence. People only remember the latest installment, and the pilot episode loses its luster,” Screen Rant quotes.
Melissa Mathison, the woman behind both the original E.T. and the scrapped synopsis, died in 2015. Thus, the only co-writer of the Nocturnal Fears synopsis is gone, and the script, according to Spielberg, is still shelved.
“I have no intention of ever seeing E.T.” he told Yahoo Entertainment on the same occasion in January 2025.
