Hello everyone and welcome to slash film daily. Today is Friday August 30th

2024 on today's episode of the show we are going to be talking about what we're

calling Stephen Spielberg's close encounters. My name is Ben Pearson I'm an editor at slash film.com and I'm joined on today's episode by slash film editor and chief film critic Chris Medjolista.

Hello.

All right, Chris, so like most living movie watchers, you and I love the films of Stephen Spielberg and you even hosted a great

podcast called 21st century Spielberg where you talk in detail about the movies that he's made since the year 2000.

That show is available wherever you get your podcast.

I would highly recommend our listeners check that out

if they haven't yet.

So Chris, today, we're not actually

going to be talking about Stephen Spielberg movies.

We're going to talk about movies that Spielberg almost made,

but for whatever reason, didn't end up falling through.

And crucially, these movies ended up being made by somebody else.

So like, famously, he was developing a movie called Night skies that was a

sci-fi horror film that was going to be a spiritual follow-up to close encounters of the

third kind that doesn't count in our conversation today because it was never actually made and therefore we have nothing to judge.

So I haven't really seen this concept explored very much elsewhere and since there aren't any big movies coming out this week and Summers wrapping up and Spielberg is kind of the

prototypical summer blockbuster director.

I thought it would be fun for us to go through the list of these known projects more or less chronologically,

talk about some of these movies and speculate about maybe

whether or not they would have been better if Spielberg directed them, if they made sense

...