Today in History: E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial was released
E.T. marked a return for Steven Spielberg to the world of the extra-terrestrial after his blockbuster, Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977.
The then 34-year-old director, Steven Spielberg, reportedly drew on his own experiences as an unusually imaginative, often-lonely child of divorce for his science-fiction classic E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, which was released on this day in 1982.
For Spielberg, E.T. marked a return to territory he had first visited with the classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), in which Richard Dreyfuss plays a man who comes face to face with a fearsome alien force that eventually proves to be human-friendly.
With E.T., Spielberg created an even more appealing vision of alien life, in the form of a diminutive creature with wrinkled skin and a glowing belly.
Spielberg worked closely with the screenwriter, Melissa Mathison to capture on film the story of the wise, kind and cuddly alien botanist who is stranded on Earth and needs the help of a sensitive little boy, Elliott (Henry Thomas) to get back home.
Elliott and his siblings, played by Robert MacNaughton and a seven-year-old Drew Barrymore, hide E.T. (as the alien dubs himself) in a closet to keep him out of sight from prying adults, including their mother, who is distracted by her painful separation from her husband. Before long, a special link develops between E.T. and Elliott, who will eventually risk his own safety to return E.T. to his planet.
From the time that E.T. had its first showing, on closing night at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, the film’s buzz was overwhelmingly positive. Richard Corliss raved in TIME magazine: “[E.T.] is a perfectly poised mixture of sweet comedy and ten-speed melodrama, of death and resurrection, of a friendship so pure and powerful it seems like an idealised love.”
TIME also included the fictional alien in its list of candidates for Man of the Year – the first film character to receive that honour.
Nominated in nine categories at the 1983 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, the film won four Oscars, for Best Sound Effects Editing, Best Visual Effects, Best Original Score and Best Sound.
E.T. also had stupendous success at the box office, eventually raking in some $435 110 554 at the US domestic box office (it was re-released in 1985 and a special 20th-anniversary edition was issued in 2002).
It brought in a further $357 800 000 from the international markets for a total of $792 910 554 worldwide.
Such was its income at the time, that when one accounts for ticket price inflation, E.T. ranks as the fourth most successful movie of all time at the US box office, behind only The Sound of Music (1965), Star Wars (1977), and Gone With the Wind (1939).
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