Decades after audiences first fell in love with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the 1982 film remains a classic, but fans hoping for more will be disappointed to find out that a sequel was scrapped years ago.
E.T. followed a young boy named Elliott Taylor (Henry Thomas) who befriended the titular extraterrestrial stranded on Earth. Eventually, Elliott helped E.T. return home. In addition to Thomas, the cast includedDee Wallace as Elliott’s mother, Mary Taylor, Robert MacNaughton as Elliott’s older brother, Michael Taylor, Drew Barrymore as Elliott’s younger sister, Gertie Taylor, and Peter Coyote as Keys, the government agent hunting E.T.
The film was directed and produced by Steven Spielberg from a script written by Melissa Mathison. Ranked among the American Film Institute’s 100 greatest American movies of all time, E.T. is considered one of the seminal works of Spielberg’s illustrious Hollywood career.
Released in June 1982, E.T. made history as the highest-grossing film of all time, raking in $797.3 million at the box office. The movie held the record for 11 years until Spielberg’s Jurassic Park surpassed its sales in 1993.
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Given the massive success of E.T., talks of a sequel were inevitable. Spielberg, now 79, even co-wrote a script titled E.T. II: Nocturnal Fears with Mathison. The story centered around Elliott and his friends being kidnapped by evil extraterrestrials and E.T. saving them. Despite the creation of a script, the sequel was ultimately scrapped.
In January 2025, Spielberg opened up about why he was reluctant to make a follow-up from the get-go.
“That was a real hard-fought victory because I didn’t have any rights. Before E.T., I had some rights, but I didn’t have a lot of rights,” he explained during a discussion with Barrymore, now 51, as part of the TCM Classic Film Festival: New York Pop-Up x 92NY event. “I kind of didn’t have what we call ‘the freeze,’ where you can stop the studio from making a sequel because you control the freeze on sequels, remakes and other ancillary uses of the IP. I didn’t have that. I got it after E.T. because of its success.”
Spielberg then recounted his reasoning for pumping the brakes on a sequel.
“I just did not want to make a sequel. I flirted with it for a little bit—just a little bit to see if I [could] think of a story—and the only thing I could think about was a book that was written by somebody that wrote the book for it called The Green Planet, which was all going to take place at E.T.’s home and see how E.T. lived,” he recalled. “But it was better as a novel than I think it would have been as a film.”
As for the prospect of an E.T. sequel happening in the future, Spielberg added, “I have no intention ever of seeing E.T. anywhere outside of this proscenium.”
While Barrymore was young when Spielberg shut down sequel talks, she understood his decision to let the original film stand on its own.
“I remember you saying, ‘We are not making a sequel to E.T.’ I think I was 8. I remember being like, ‘OK, that’s a bummer, but I totally get it,’” she said. “I thought it was a smart choice. I very much understand it. Where do we go from here? They’re just going to compare it to the first and leave something that’s perfect alone in isolation open to scrutiny. It made so much sense.”
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