Powerful biopic devoted to President Abraham Lincoln and carried by Daniel Day Lewis, “Lincoln”, released in 20212, was originally supposed to be a mini-series, which Spielberg was trying to put together for the HBO channel…
In a brilliant and already very long career, Steven Spielberg has tried his hand at almost all registers and genres, more or less successfully; witness his yet superb West Side Story which was a cruel and colossal failure in theaters. It is even moreover the biggest flop ever cashed by the filmmaker.
On the TV side, he is or has been executive producer of many series, such as SeaQuest, Halo, Band of Brothers, Under The Dome, Falling Skies, the Tiny Toons animated series… To name but a few. . But he has, in the end, only very, very little dabbled in realization on this side. To date, his last contribution dates back to an episode of the anthological series Histoires Fantastiques, in 1985.
In a recent Podcast, he reveals that he has been toying with the idea of directing a series for years. And his last attempt dates back to ten years ago, at the time of his biopic devoted to Abraham Lincoln, which allowed Daniel Day Lewis to pocket the third Oscar for Best Actor of his career.
The filmmaker initially wanted to make a 6-hour mini-series for the HBO cable channel: “I was ready to make a deal with HBO and turn the movie into a six-episode miniseries. The first draft of the script for Tony Kushner was 550 pages, so I had enough material. I don’t know if I could have motivated Daniel Day-Lewis on a six-hour series, but I was close to doing it.”
Spielberg lets go that nobody, or so few, believed in this project, thus forcing him to revise his ambitions downwards to make it a film instead of a mini-series. Whether lincoln A far cry from previous global box office triumphs for the filmmaker, the work was critically acclaimed and grossed just over $275 million.
The filmmaker is always open to the idea of directing a series, emphasizing that he is waiting for the right subject: “I have an appetite for feature films, and one day I will direct a series. I mean, if someone had brought me Mare of Easttown, I would have made it! It was a beautifully done story.”
Small suggestion: if he could precisely carry out the mini-series project he was developing ten years ago based on Stanley Kubrick’s aborted Napoleon… According to the latest news, the script was reworked and completed in 2021 by Cary Joji Fukunaga…