Steven Spielberg majorly regrets scene he edited out of E.T. 20 years after the film was released

When E.T. The Extra Terrestrial was re-released 20 years on after it first landed on our screens in 1982, there's one part Steven Spielberg cut out that he now regrets.

Just to make you feel really old, it's now been more than 40 years since the film first came out, meaning there's less time between the initial release and the re-release than the re-release and now.

Spielberg has talked in the past about not being able to watch many of his movies once he's finished making them, but the classic film E.T. is one he has been able to rewatch.

A huge part of that is because he was able to watch it with his kids and he considers it to have been a 'pretty perfect movie' that he feels he 'can actually look back at again and again'.

Still, while it's one of his best films (and he's set the bar very high over the years), there is something he really regrets doing to it when the time came to re-release the film.

World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

Speaking at the Time 100 Summit yesterday (25 April), he admitted that he really regretted cutting out the guns that the government agents were carrying for the 2002 re-release and replacing them with walkie-talkies.

He said: "That was a mistake. That was a mistake. I never should have done that because E.T. was a product of its era.

"No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are, either voluntarily or being forced to peer through.

"E.T. was a film that I was sensitive to the fact that the federal agents were approaching kids with firearms exposed and I thought I would change the guns into walkie talkies. Years went by and I changed my own views."

Spielberg said he should 'never have messed with the archive of my own work' and encouraged other directors not to make the same mistake he'd come to regret so much.

Certain other directors (looking at you George Lucas) have gained something of a reputation for going back and tinkering with their movies to keep changing bits, often to the dismay of the fans when they realise there's now no way to see the films in their original form.

Spielberg said that movies were 'a signpost of where we were when we made them' and that he really regretted 'having that out there'.