Going against the grain with alien visitation movies, Spielberg once again made the visitors friendly as he did with the 1977 classic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
The film began shooting in September 1981 under the cover name of 'A Boy's Life' to protect the plot from plagiarism. E.T. premiered as the closing film of the Cannes Film Festival on May 26,1982 and was released in the United States on June 11, 1982. The film was an immediate blockbuster, surpassing 'Star Wars' to become the highest-grossing film of all time, a record it held for eleven years until Spielberg's own 'JurassicPark' surpassed it in 1993 (E.T. returned $792.9 from a $10.5m budget).
E.T. was widely acclaimed by critics, and the film is now regarded as one of the greatest of all time.
