Steven Spielberg’s 115-minute Sci-fi Masterpiece Soars Back to the Top of the Streaming Charts

Steven Spielberg has spent more than five decades making the kinds of movies that become permanent fixtures of pop culture.

Jaws practically invented the modern summer blockbuster, Raiders of the Lost Ark gave audiences one of cinema’s greatest adventure heroes, and Jurassic Park made dinosaurs feel real enough to terrify an entire generation. He’s also behind prestige dramas like Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, while more recent films like West Side Story and The Fabelmans showed he was still finding new ways into familiar genres.

This year, he returned to science fiction with the well-received Disclosure Day, once again tapping into his fascination with extraterrestrial life. Now, one of Spielberg’s earliest sci-fi hits from the 1980s is back near the top of the streaming charts, giving audiences another reason to revisit the filmmaker’s long-running fascination with visitors from beyond Earth.

What is E.T. about?

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial follows Elliott, a lonely 10-year-old boy who discovers an alien that has accidentally been left behind on Earth. He secretly brings the creature home, introduces it to his siblings, and tries to help E.T. contact his own kind before government scientists close in.

The setup is simple, but Spielberg turns it into a deeply emotional story about childhood, friendship, loneliness, and saying goodbye. That combination of intimate family drama and huge sci-fi spectacle helped make E.T. a phenomenon when it was released in 1982.

It also became enormously influential. The image of Elliott and E.T. flying across the moon on a bicycle remains one of the most recognizable shots in movie history. The movie was also a massive commercial success, becoming one of the highest-grossing films ever made at the time and turning its small alien visitor into a pop-culture icon almost overnight.

What’s next for Steven Spielberg?

Spielberg returned to extraterrestrial territory earlier this year with Disclosure Day. The sci-fi thriller, starring Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, and Colman Domingo, opened at No. 1 with $44 million domestically and $92.9 million worldwide, giving Spielberg his biggest opening for an original movie in years.

The movie was also warmly received by critics. Polygon’s review praised Disclosure Day for recapturing the curiosity and childlike sense of wonder that defined Spielberg movies like E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, while still delivering the momentum of a modern chase thriller.

But Spielberg’s next project will apparently send him in a completely different direction. During an appearance at SXSW earlier this year, the director revealed that he is developing a Western — one of the few major genres he has never fully tackled despite talking about wanting to make one for years.