Spielberg's Harry Potter Plan

With the impending release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1 marking the beginning of the end for the Boy Who Lived's big screen adventures, Warner Bros. topper Alan Horn recently looked back at the franchise's origins and spoke to the press about what might have been.

In a chat with the Los Angeles Times blog Hero Complex, Horn recalled how a certain Oscar-winning filmmaker was originally eyed to direct Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone before Chris Columbus landed the job.

"I did think it would be worthwhile for Steven Spielberg to direct," said Horn. "We offered it to him. But one of the notions of Dreamworks' and Steven's was, 'Let's combine a couple of the books, let's make it animated,' and that was because of the [visual effects and] Pixar had demonstrated that animated movies could be extremely successful. Because of the wizardry involved, they were very effects-laden. So I don't blame them. But I did not want to combine the movies, and I wanted it to be live action."