Veteran director Steven Spielberg’s follow-up to The Fabelmans will be a return to a subject that the filmmaker has history with: UFOs.
Since the release of The Fabelmans at the beginning of 2023, Steven Spielberg hasn’t announced his next project. As is always the case, we know the filmmaker has things cooking away: there’s the remake of Bullitt that looked to be in pole position to be the director’s next film to go in front of cameras. There’s also the Cape Fear TV series for Apple that he’s setting up with Martin Scorsese, not to mention the Ready Player One sequel that he will be stepping back from but still producing.
However, we didn’t know what Spielberg’s next directorial project until now. Variety is claiming that the veteran filmmaker’s next move is to ‘likely make his next project a UFO film based on his own original idea.’ While that’s some way short of an official confirmation, it’s the freshest news we have to go on as of right now.
Given that the last we heard of Bullitt, the film was still at the scripting stage (that was late last year), perhaps this is a case of Spielberg’s UFO film simply being ready to go first. The project reportedly boasts a script by a previous Spielberg collaborator: Jurassic Park scribe, David Koepp.
Or perhaps making The Fabelmans, Spielberg’s most personal film, has him wanting to make another film in that vein? UFO movies are a genre that Spielberg has returned to throughout his career, with them often containing ideas and themes that are personal to him, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial being perhaps the most personal of a bunch that also features Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and War Of The Worlds, among others.
The report doesn’t contain any other information at all, so we don’t have a lot else to go on here. When further details do emerge though, you can be sure we’ll let you know.
