steven spielberg

Technology will be used to ensure you can only watch the show when it’s dark out.

This never-before-seen video has been sitting on a shelf for decades.

Spielbergian, kaiju, and eleven (as in “goes to...”) are all now official words in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The antics of Yakko, Wakko and Dot were timeless enough that an Animaniacs revival feels long-overdue. The three may just get loose from the Warner tower yet again, as reports suggest Warner Bros. animation is tooling around with a new Animaniacs, once again guided by Steven Spielberg.

Ready Player One could best be described as absolutely maddening to adapt into a movie. First of all, in Ernest Cline’s book you have two separate worlds to deal with: the dystopian slum world America has devolved into, and then the virtual world inside the OASIS that people use to escape their reality. The OASIS is peppered with ’80s and ’90s pop culture references — they become integral to the plot — so it makes sense that Steven Spielberg, one of the people who essentially created the late 20th century pop culture landscape, would be a good choice to direct it.

Given how much space physical media takes up, it’s hard for movie buffs to say no to the great promise of “cloud storage,” and the idea that we could summon anything we want to watch with just a couple of clicks. But so far, reality hasn’t matched the hype. Streaming services have been focused on exclusives and original programming, to the extent that the only way to have access to everything available is to spend hundreds of dollars a month on subscription fees. Meanwhile, older films keep disappearing from the digital archives; and even items that cinephiles “own” sometimes become inaccessible whenever software updates or a site shutters.

When all you care about is money, bad things happen. That’s the message of Jurassic World, where greedy theme-park executives hoping to spike attendance engineer the “Indominus Rex,” a genetically-modified dinosaur that immediately turns on its creators and runs amok. Designed as a cautionary tale about the dangers of building a meaner, badder monster purely for the sake of profits, Jurassic World works equally well as a cautionary tale about doing the same thing in movies. All of the rationalizations provided by Jurassic World’s employees — “Consumers want them bigger, louder, more teeth.” “Somebody’s gotta make sure this company has a future!” — could have been taken directly out of the mouths of the studio executives who approved this gene splice of a reboot and a sequel. Their creation — the Indominus or the movie, there’s basically no difference — is as advertised; huge, mean, and visually striking. But this experiment is not without consequences.

When Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg last made a war film, they produced Saving Private Ryan, which was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, and features what’s widely considered one of the greatest battle scenes ever captured on film. They’ve worked together since, including on Catch Me If You Can, one of the best movies of either man’s career, but Bridge of Spies might be considered a kind of spiritual sequel to Ryan. That was Hanks and Spielberg’s World War II picture. This is their Cold War one.

On June 20, 1975 a movie about an angry fish opened in about 500 theaters around the country. It was called Jaws, it was directed a guy named Steven Spielberg, it was scary as hell, and it changed the world forever. Its unique release strategy (wide instead of limited), intense television marketing campaign, and record-breaking box office essentially created the summer movie season (and made Spielberg a household name). 40 years later, regardless of its impact, Jaws remains a masterpiece, and a much better and more interesting movie than the vast majority of so-called summer blockbusters that it birthed.

There’s a running joke in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade that Indy took his nickname from the family dog. That joke has some truth to it though because as George Lucas was developing Raiders of the Lost Ark, he actually named the character after his dog, Jones (the “Indiana” was a riff on Steve McQueen character Nevada Smith). Coincidentally, the same dog was the inspiration for Chewbacca in Star Wars. Need more Raiders of the Lost Ark facts? Throw us the idol and we’ll throw you the latest episode of You Think You Know Movies!

We weren't altogether surprised to learn that TV powers would look to develop Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise's 'Minority Report' as an ongoing series, considering the pantheon of movie-TV reboots, but consider our interest piqued. Not only will the new series unfold on FOX, but as a sequel series to the original film with a female lead!

We'd be the first ones to talk your ear off about the future of movies being given the TV treatment, but the latest entry makes the idea surprisingly literal. A new report suggests that Steven Spielberg has hired 'Godzilla' writer Max Borenstein to develop a TV series based around 2002 PreCrime thriller 'Minority Report,' but will the adaptation end up arrested before it even begins?