That Time Steven Spielberg Almost Ruined a 'Monkey Island' Film

Readers might be wondering how come Steven Spielberg, director of the gamer masterpiece Ready Player One and of the swashbuckling mega-hit Hook, managed to find the time to destroy a project about pirates that was also a video game adaptation, but he's a man of many talents. 

The Monkey Island series enjoyed a lot of success with the release of the first game in the very-early ‘90s year of 1990, and 7 years later it was still going strong with Curse Of Monkey Island. This naturally prompted money-hungry Hollywood execs the cool people at Lucasfilm to invest in the video-game-to-failed-film pipeline. The project stayed afloat for a few years but ended up getting canceled back in '01. Why? Well, first off because all good video game adaptations need Sonic, but we can forgive them for not knowing about it back then, so maybe it was because of Spielberg's bonkers vision. Spielberg wanted to literally monkey it up. Yes, he wanted to throw away every single character and create a roster of new monkey characters. We know it's in the name, and that the series actually does feature some monkeys, but this just feels like Spielberg forgot that he was the boss and not an overworked intern who had to pretend he'd read the script and not just the title. When Spielberg thinks about the term “banana republic”, does he picture a place populated solely by republicans?

While we do love to warm ourselves in the fires of a good crash and burn story, especially one that likely resulted in the creation of the Pirates Of The Caribbean's series first film, it's sad that it also resulted in the failure of the first and only attempted crossover between Lucasarts and Lucasfilm. Well, at least we still have the upcoming Return To Monkey Island to look forward to.

Top Image: ILM, eisnerguy