Steven Spielberg has plenty of abandoned projects in his wake, but few sound quite as unwieldy as “Robopocalypse.” Before “Disclosure Day” returns him to the sci-fi lane this summer, Spielberg is looking back at the Daniel H. Wilson adaptation that got away, describing it in blunt terms: “It was gargantuan. It was a company-ender. It would have ended a whole studio that would have never made its money back,” he explained in the latest issue of Empire (via GamesRadar). “So, I literally decided it was going to be the most expensive movie I ever directed, and I wasn’t ready to take that on.”
The film had moved far enough to look real. Drew Goddard was on the screenplay, and Chris Hemsworth, Anne Hathaway, and Ben Whishaw were lined up to star in the adaptation of Wilson’s 2011 novel about an AI uprising.
Spielberg also explained why he kept the project out of DreamWorks and why he started shopping it around instead: “My company, DreamWorks, financed all these films, and I did not want to bring Robo’ into my own company, because it would have just been too expensive for us to produce. And then I took it out to other companies. I didn’t want to pay for it, but other companies were interested in paying for it, as long as I was the director.”
At one point, Disney was set to release the film, and production was gearing up for Canada before delays pushed it from July 2013 to April 2014. Then Spielberg put it on indefinite hold in early 2013, and his reasoning was as direct as everything else he said about it: “I didn’t want to do that to anybody because I couldn’t guarantee the audience.”
So “Robopocalypse” remains one of those giant Spielberg near-misses that got far enough to feel tangible before the financial logic collapsed under it. “Disclosure Day,” starring Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, and Colin Firth, opens June 12, 2026.
