Steven Spielberg Originally Planned HOOK as a Musical Starring Michael Jackson Who Allegedly Put a Curse on The Director — GeekTyrant

When Steven Spielberg set off on the journey to make his Peter Pan film Hook, he had a very different vision of it than the one he actually ended up making. The filmmaker actually started thinking about making this movie in 1982 after he made E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.

At that time, newspapers started reporting that Spielberg was looking at casting pop legend Michael Jackson in the film. As you know, Jackson was also a big fan of the Peter Pan story, and he was definitely involved at the time. This is something the two had in common as Spielberg once said, “I still feel like Peter Pan. It has been very hard for me to grow up.”

In 1985 Spielberg’s plans started to come together, and he cast Dusting Hoffman as Captain Hook and was planning on developing the film as a musical. Composer John Williams even came on board and had written a number of songs for the film. Crews were also starting to build sets in London.

In Steven Spielberg: A Biography, we learned that it was around this time when Spielberg has his first kid and he did not want to move to London to shoot the movie. He also started having second thoughts and started looking at other films to make, and that’s when he jumped on board Empire of The Sun.

When talking about that, Spielberg told the New York Times: “I was also attracted to the idea that this was a death of innocence, not an attenuation of childhood… this was the opposite of Peter Pan.”

While Spielberg was making Empire of The Sun, Paramount Pictures continued work on the Pan film without Spielberg. Nick Castle, who played Michael Myers in Halloween and directed The Last Starfighter, was set to direct the movie, and the story he was developing centered on Peter Pan growing up and working as a lawyer in America, his time in Neverland forgotten, until Captain Hook returns and kidnaps Peter’s own children.

When Spielberg heard about the new direction of the story, his interest in the project sparked back up and by the time he jumped on board, the project was now set up at Sony. When Spielberg came back on board, he had to break the news to Jackson that he was not going to be in the movie anymore.

Spielberg told Entertainment Weekly, “I called Michael and I said, “This is about a lawyer that is brought back to save his kids and discovers that he was once, when he was younger, Peter Pan.’ So Michael understood at that point it wasn’t the same Peter Pan he wanted to make.”

However, Vanity Fair later alleged that Jackson hired a witch doctor to put a curse on Spielberg when he lost the gig.

Robin Williams was then cast as Peter, with Hoffman still set to play Hook. Julia Roberts was cast as Tinkerbell, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit star Bob Hoskins took on the role of Hook’s sidekick, Smee.

While Spielberg did not like the movie, audiences like myself loved it, and the movie has a huge fanbase to this day that will defend the greatness of this adventure film!

Via: Yahoo