Steven Spielberg shelved sci-fi epic Robopocalypse because it was on course to become "the most expensive movie" he'd ever made.
The director wanted to bring Daniel H. Wilson's 2011 novel to the big screen, but he worried it would be a "company-ender" if it failed to make back its estimated $200 million budget.
He told Empire magazine: "It was gargantuan. It was a company-ender. It would have ended a whole studio that would have never made its money back".
Spielberg added of the project: "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.
"The budget was so high that I didn’t want to do that to anybody because I couldn’t guarantee the audience.
"I couldn’t even hope for a crowd that big that would justify that kind of a financial overreach. 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."
Spielberg went on to reveal he has plenty more sci-fi films he still wants to make and he still hopes to eventually make his first horror movie.
It comes after the director recently acknowledged he also wants to make a Western and he's got a project already in development, teasing the film will have "horses and guns" but he is trying to steer away from other conventions and "tropes" typically associated with the genre, though he didn't give any plot details.
Speaking to The Big Picture's Sean Fennessey at SXSW in Austin, Texas last month, he was asked about his next film and explained: "Well, I'm developing a Western.
"And it's gonna have horses. There will be guns. But there'll be no tropes, I can just tell you that. There are gonna be no stereotypes, no tropes."
The Jaws director has long discussed his desire to work on a Western. Speaking in 2021, he told Yahoo!: "I was asked that question over the last 40 years of my career, if not longer, and I always say, ‘A musical is the one thing I haven’t done.’
"The thing I neglected to say is the one genre I haven’t really tackled yet is the Western. So who knows? Maybe I’ll be putting on spurs someday. Who knows?"
