Steven Spielberg Says He “Walked Away” from ‘Harry Potter’ for ‘A.I.’ After Stanley Kubrick’s Death

If you can believe it, Steven Spielberg was attached to direct the first “Harry Potter” film in the late 1990s and spent time with J. K. Rowling and Warner Bros., including taking part in the casting process. However, he eventually left the project, and now we know why.

In an interview with TCM, Spielberg revealed that the death of Stanley Kubrick in 1999, and the Kubrick family’s efforts to persuade him to direct “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” prompted his sudden departure from “Harry Potter.”

After Stanley’s death, I was at the funeral at his home. Christiane Kubrick and Jan Harlan, her brother, approached me about taking over from Stanley, as Stanley had intended, and directing the movie.

It seems as though Spielberg was further along in pre-production on “Harry Potter” than had initially been reported. He says he had already signed on to direct and had even begun casting the film alongside Rowling:

I actually walked away from Harry Potter, which I was scheduled to direct as my next movie. I gave it up. It was going to be a huge movie because the book already was a runaway cultural phenomenon. I gave that up to essentially do ‘A.I.’

Kubrick was the original driving force behind “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” and had been developing the project for decades, beginning in the 1970s. He extensively developed the film through multiple script iterations, and was widely expected to direct it once he felt the technology could properly realize the story’s central character. By the 1990s, A.I. remained one of his key unrealized projects.

Can you just imagine a world where Spielberg had actually directed ‘Harry Potter’? A commitment that might never have gives us the staggering run of films he ended up delivering between 2001 and 2005: “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” “Minority Report,” “Catch Me If You Can,” and “Munich.”

Of course, as history would have it, “Home Alone” director Chris Columbus would wind up in the ‘Potter’ director’s chair, helming the first two instalments, released in 2001 and 2002.

Spielberg, of course, made the right decision, artistically speaking. “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” which was initially met with reservedly positive reviews, is the one film in his filmography that keeps aging like fine wine. The critical rehabilitation of the film has been wonderful to witness. Once dismissed as a muddled Kubrick-Spielberg hybrid upon its 2001 release, it placed in the top six of our Spielberg critics’ poll, ahead of “Saving Private Ryan” and “Jurassic Park.” Time has clearly been kind to this haunting sci-fi fairy tale.