MOVIE NEWS – Steven Spielberg is back in alien territory with Disclosure Day, and while discussing his latest sci-fi film, he has also answered a question fans have been asking for decades. The director has now revealed what really happened to Elliott and E.T. after their unforgettable goodbye in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
There is a lot of attention around Steven Spielberg right now, and for good reason: his newest big-screen blockbuster, Disclosure Day, brings him back to the genre that helped define his career. The film is widely being viewed as part of a loose thematic trilogy alongside Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, since it appears to revisit the same human fears, uncertainties, and hopes that powered those earlier sci-fi classics. Yet one question has lingered longer than almost any other: what exactly happened to Elliott and E.T. after their adventure in the 1982 film came to an end?
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial follows the deeply personal journey between Elliott, a lonely young boy, and E.T., the stranded alien he befriends. The story moves from their first encounter in the backyard of a quiet California suburb through their growing bond, the shifting dynamics inside Elliott’s home, and the “phone home” mission that leads to the now-iconic bicycle escape, as Elliott and his friends try to return E.T. to the mothership waiting in the forest. Their adventure ends with a goodbye that is both devastating and hopeful: E.T. touches his glowing finger to Elliott’s forehead and says, “I’ll be right here,” promising that their emotional and telepathic connection will endure.
That exchange has fueled decades of fan theories about the bond between Elliott and E.T., and about what might have happened after the spaceship left Earth. During a recent appearance on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, Spielberg finally addressed the speculation and gave a direct answer: Elliott never saw E.T. again, at least not in a physical sense. According to the director, the two remained connected across space and time through their psychic link. “Never saw him again. But he did dream about him. So, there was the psychic link between the two of them. If you notice that E.T. touched Elliott right here and said, ‘I’ll be right here.’ That was for the rest of Elliott’s life,” Spielberg explained.
Fans may remember that Elliott and E.T. technically reunited in the 2019 Xfinity holiday commercial A Holiday Reunion, in which Henry Thomas reprised his role as Elliott, now an adult with a wife and two children of his own. The short showed E.T. visiting Elliott’s suburban home and discovering how much technology had changed since their original adventure. Many viewers treated it as a kind of sequel to the 1982 film, but Spielberg’s latest comments make it clear that the commercial should not be considered official film canon. In the narrative world of the original movie, the physical farewell in the forest was Elliott and E.T.’s final real-world interaction, however painful that may be to accept.
Source: MovieWeb
