James Cameron is well known as the one true king of blockbusters. Not only is he the only director to ever have a movie make more than $2 billion at the international box office, he's done it twice with Avatar and Titanic. Not too far down on the all time world wide box office grosses list, however, standing at number 22, is Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park. What you may not know is that JP was almost a James Cameron movie too.
Cameron recently made an appearance at the recently-opened Titanic Museum in Belfast and revealed to The Huffington Post that he was beaten to the rights by Spielberg by just a few hours. What's surprising, though, is that while Cameron had a full developed idea of what he could turn Michael Crichton's story into, he actually humbly admits that what Spielberg did with the material was much better than what he had planned.
"When I saw the film, I realised that I was not the right person to make the film, he was," Cameron said. Because he made a dinosaur movie for kids, and mine would have been Aliens with dinosaurs, and that wouldn't have been fair...Dinosaurs are for 8-year-olds. We can all enjoy it, too, but kids get dinosaurs and they should not have been excluded for that. His sensibility was right for that film, I'd have gone further, nastier, much nastier."
While I certainly have zero interest in anyone ever trying to remake Jurassic Park (please god, no), I must say I am really curious about Cameron's larger vision. How much more nastier/creepier could he have gone from what Spielberg did (Samuel L. Jackson's disembodied hand, the Velociraptor hunt in the kitchen, the T-Rex eating the lawyer off the toilet)? Maybe Cameron could hire an artist and turn it into a graphic novel or something.
