Steven Spielberg wanted to turn Harry Potter into an animated franchise, it has been reported.
The JURASSIC PARK director and one of the founders of DreamWorks was initially approached by Warner Bros president Alan Horn to adapt JK Rowling’s best-selling novels for the big screen, where he proposed giving it the DreamWorks touch and turning it into a Pixar-style animation.
“I did think it would be worthwhile for Steven Spielberg to direct, we offered it to him – but one of the notions of Dreamworks’ and Steven’s was, ‘Let’s combine a couple of the books, let’s make it animated,’ and that was because of the [visual effects and] Pixar had demonstrated that animated movies could be extremely successful,” Alan told the Los Angeles Times.
“Because of the wizardry involved, they were very effects-laden. So I don’t blame them. But I did not want to combine the movie and I wanted it to be live action.”
Steven then took on Warner’s 2001 sci-fi film AI: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE , while the Hogwarts post fell to Chris Columbus, director of HOME ALONE and MRS DOUBTFIRE.
