Kubrick asked Sara Maitland to give the film mythic resonance. She recalls "He never referred to the film as 'A.I.'; he always called it 'Pinocchio.'" Kubrick's version ended the same way Spielberg's does, with advanced mechas reviving Monica, but only for a day.
Pre-production
In early 1994, the film was in pre-production with Christopher "Fangorn" Baker as concept artist and Sara Maitland assisting on the story, which gave it "a feminist fairy-tale focus". Maitland said that Kubrick never referred to the film as A.I., but as Pinocchio. Chris Cunningham became the new visual effects supervisor. Some of his unproduced work for A.I. can be seen on the DVD The Work of Director Chris Cunningham.
Aside from considering computer animation, Kubrick also had Joseph Mazzello do a screen test for the lead role. The film was put on hold due to Kubrick's commitment to Eyes Wide Shut (1999). By November 1999, Spielberg was writing the screenplay based on Watson's 90-page story treatment. It was his first solo screenplay credit since Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Pre-production was briefly halted during February 2000 because Spielberg pondered directing other projects, which were Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Minority Report and Memoirs of a Geisha. The following month, Spielberg announced that A.I. would be his next project, with Minority Report as a follow-up. When he decided to fast track A.I., Spielberg brought back Chris Baker as concept artist.
Filming and visual effects
The original start date was July 10, 2000, Aside from a couple of weeks of shooting on location in Oxbow Regional Park in Oregon, A.I. was shot entirely using sound stages at Warner Bros. Studios and the Spruce Goose Dome in Long Beach, California.
Spielberg copied Kubrick's obsessively secretive approach to filmmaking by refusing to give the complete script to cast and crew, banning press from the set, and making actors sign confidentiality agreements. For instance, Jack Angel, who voiced Teddy, recorded his lines entirely out of context, only receiving direction to sound like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh, except "very wise and old and stoic". However, Spielberg asked Angel to be on the set every day to make line alterations wherever he felt necessary. Spielberg initially wanted to follow Kubrick's vision to have David as a robot, he hired Stan Winston to build an animatronic of David until it was dropped after Spielberg and the crew saw Osment's performance in The Sixth Sense. Social robotics expert Cynthia Breazeal served as technical consultant during production. Costume designer Bob Ringwood studied pedestrians on the Las Vegas Strip for his influence on the Rouge City extras. Visual effects, such as removing the visible rods controlling Teddy and removing Haley Joel Osment's breath, were provided in-houses by PDI/DreamWorks.
Casting
Julianne Moore and Gwyneth Paltrow were considered for the role of Monica Swinton before Frances O'Connor was cast. Jerry Seinfeld was originally considered to voice and play the Comedian Robot before Chris Rock was cast.
Allusions
A. O. Scott notes Spielberg's homages to Kubrick, "sly references to A Clockwork Orange, The Shining and predominantly 2001: A Space Odyssey", as well as Collodi's Pinocchio. The band Ministry appears in the film playing the song "What About Us?", but the song does not appear on the official soundtrack album.
Williams called his score an "homage a Kubrick". He includes echoes of György Ligeti's choral music, which Kubrick used in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Per Kubrick's request, Williams included a quotation of Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier in his score.
Release
Marketing
The teaser trailer debuted on December 8, 2000, with the theatrical release of Proof of Life. Warner Bros. used an alternate reality game titled The Beast to promote the film. Over forty websites were created by Atomic Pictures in New York City (kept online at Cloudmakers.org), including the website for Cybertronics Corp. There were to be a series of video games for the Xbox video game console that followed the storyline of The Beast, but they went undeveloped. To avoid audiences mistaking A.I. for a family film, no action figures were created, although Hasbro released a talking Teddy following the film's release in June 2001. A.I. premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2001.
Home media
A.I. Artificial Intelligence was released on VHS and DVD in the United States by DreamWorks Home Entertainment on March 5, 2002, in widescreen and fullscreen two-disc special editions featuring an extensive sixteen-part documentary detailing the film's development, production, visual effects, sound design and music. The bonuses also include interviews with Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Frances O'Connor, Steven Spielberg and John Williams, two teaser trailers for the film's original theatrical release, and an extensive photo gallery featuring production stills and Stanley Kubrick's original storyboards. It was released overseas by Warner Home Video.
The film was released on Blu-ray in Japan by Warner Home Video on December 22, 2010, followed shortly by a United States release by Paramount Home Entertainment (Paramount currently owns the pre-2010 live-action DreamWorks catalog) on April 5, 2011. This Blu-ray features the film remastered in high-definition and incorporates all the bonus features previously included on the two-disc special-edition DVD.
Reception
Box office
The film opened in 3,242 theaters in the United States and Canada on June 29, 2001, earning $29.35 million at #1 during its opening weekend. A.I. went on to gross $78.62 million in the United States and Canada. Opening on 524 screens in Japan, A.I. grossed almost two billion Yen in its first five days, the biggest June opening in Japan at the time, and sold more tickets in its opening weekend than Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, although it grossed slightly less. It went on to gross $78 million in Japan. It grossed $157 million in other countries, for a worldwide total of $235.93 million.
Critical response
On Rotten Tomatoes, A.I. Artificial Intelligence holds an approval rating of 76% based on reviews from 201 critics, with an average rating of 6.60/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "A curious, not always seamless, amalgamation of Kubrick's chilly bleakness and Spielberg's warm-hearted optimism. A.I. is, in a word, fascinating." On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 65 out of 100 based on reviews from 32 critics, which indicates "generally favorable reviews". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C+" on a scale of A+ to F.
Producer Jan Harlan stated that Kubrick "would have applauded" the final film, while Kubrick's widow Christiane also enjoyed A.I. Brian Aldiss admired the film as well: "I thought what an inventive, intriguing, ingenious, involving film this was. There are flaws in it and I suppose I might have a personal quibble but it's so long since I wrote it." Of the film's ending, he wondered how it might have been had Kubrick directed the film: "That is one of the 'ifs' of film history—at least the ending indicates Spielberg adding some sugar to Kubrick's wine. The actual ending is overly sympathetic and moreover rather overtly engineered by a plot device that does not really bear credence. But it's a brilliant piece of film and of course it's a phenomenon because it contains the energies and talents of two brilliant filmmakers."
A. O. Scott writes: "Mr. Spielberg seems to be attempting the improbable feat of melding Kubrick's chilly, analytical style with his own warmer, needier sensibility. He tells the story slowly and films it with lucid, mesmerizing objectivity, creating a mood as layered, dissonant and strange as John Williams's unusually restrained, modernist score." He concludes: "The very end somehow fuses the cathartic comfort of infantile wish fulfillment -- the dream that the first perfect love whose loss we experience as the fall from Eden might be restored -- with a feeling almost too terrible to acknowledge or to name. Refusing to cuddle us or lull us into easy sleep, Mr. Spielberg locates the unspoken moral of all our fairy tales. To be real is to be mortal; to be human is to love, to dream and to perish."
Richard Corliss of Time magazine heavily praised Spielberg's direction, as well as the cast and visual effects.
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three stars out of a possible four, saying that it is "wonderful and maddening". Ebert later gave the film a full four stars and added it to his "Great Movies" canon in 2011.
Leonard Maltin, on the other hand, gives the film two stars out of four in his Movie Guide, writing, "[The] intriguing story draws us in, thanks in part to Osment's exceptional performance, but takes several wrong turns; ultimately, it just doesn't work. Spielberg rewrote the adaptation Stanley Kubrick commissioned of the Brian Aldiss short story Super Toys Last All Summer Long; [the] result is a curious and uncomfortable hybrid of Kubrick and Spielberg sensibilities." However, Maltin called John Williams's music score "striking".
Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader compared A.I. to Solaris (1972), and praised both "Kubrick for proposing that Spielberg direct the project and Spielberg for doing his utmost to respect Kubrick's intentions while making it a profoundly personal work". In 2009, he described A.I. as "a very great and deeply misunderstood film", noting that Andrew Sarris, Stan Brakhage and James Naremore "more or less" agreed with this assessment.
Film critic Armond White of the New York Press praised the film, noting that "each part of David's journey through carnal and sexual universes into the final eschatological devastation becomes as profoundly philosophical and contemplative as anything by cinema's most thoughtful, speculative artists – Borzage, Ozu, Demy, Tarkovsky."
Filmmaker Billy Wilder hailed A.I. as "the most underrated film of the past few years". When British filmmaker Ken Russell saw the film, he wept during the ending.
Screenwriter Ian Watson has speculated, "Worldwide, A.I. was very successful (and the 4th-highest earner of the year) but it didn't do quite so well in America, because the film, so I'm told, was too poetical and intellectual in general for American tastes. Plus, quite a few critics in America misunderstood the film, thinking for instance that the Giacometti-style beings in the final 20 minutes were aliens (whereas they were robots of the future who had evolved themselves from the robots in the earlier part of the film) and also thinking that the final 20 minutes were a sentimental addition by Spielberg, whereas those scenes were exactly what I wrote for Stanley and exactly what he wanted, filmed faithfully by Spielberg."
Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle gave a largely negative review. "A.I. exhibits all its creators' bad traits and none of the good. So we end up with the structureless, meandering, slow-motion endlessness of Kubrick combined with the fuzzy, cuddly mindlessness of Spielberg." Dubbing it Spielberg's "first boring movie", LaSalle also believed that the robots at the end of the film were aliens, and compared Gigolo Joe to the "useless" Jar Jar Binks, yet praised Robin Williams for his portrayal of a futuristic Albert Einstein.
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone magazine gave a mixed review, concluding, "Spielberg cannot live up to Kubrick's darker side of the future", but still put the film on his top ten list that year.
David Denby in The New Yorker criticized A.I. for not adhering closely to his concept of the Pinocchio character.
Spielberg responded to some of the criticisms of the film, stating that many of the "so called sentimental" elements of A.I., including the ending, were in fact Kubrick's, and the darker elements were his own. However, Sara Maitland, who worked on the project with Kubrick in the 1990s, said that Kubrick never started production on A.I. because he had a hard time making the ending work.
James Berardinelli found the film "consistently involving, with moments of near-brilliance, but far from a masterpiece. In fact, as the long-awaited 'collaboration' of Kubrick and Spielberg, it ranks as something of a disappointment." Of the film's highly debated finale, he claimed, "There is no doubt that the concluding 30 minutes are all Spielberg; the outstanding question is where Kubrick's vision left off and Spielberg's began."
John Simon of the National Review described A.I. "as an uneasy mix of trauma and treacle".
In 2002, Spielberg told film critic Joe Leydon, "People pretend to think they know Stanley Kubrick, and think they know me, when most of them don't know either of us... And what's really funny about that is, all the parts of A.I. that people assume were Stanley's were mine. And all the parts of A.I. that people accuse me of sweetening and softening and sentimentalizing were all Stanley's. The teddy bear was Stanley's. The whole last 20 minutes of the movie was completely Stanley's. The whole first 35, 40 minutes of the film—all the stuff in the house—was word for word, from Stanley's screenplay. This was Stanley's vision... Eighty percent of the critics got it all mixed up. But I could see why. Because, obviously, I've done a lot of movies where people have cried and have been sentimental. And I've been accused of sentimentalizing hard-core material. But in fact it was Stanley who did the sweetest parts of A.I., not me. I'm the guy who did the dark center of the movie, with the Flesh Fair and everything else. That's why he wanted me to make the movie in the first place. He said, 'This is much closer to your sensibilities than my own. Spielberg said, "While there was divisiveness when A.I. came out, I felt that I had achieved Stanley's wishes, or goals."
On re-watching the film many years after its release, BBC film critic Mark Kermode apologized to Spielberg in a January 2013 interview for "getting it wrong" on the film when he first viewed it in 2001. He came to believe that the film is Spielberg's "enduring masterpiece".
In July 2025, it was one of the films voted for the "Readers' Choice" edition of The New York Times list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century," finishing at number 258. That same month, it ranked number 61 on Rolling Stones list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century."
Accolades
Visual effects supervisors Dennis Muren, Stan Winston, Michael Lantieri and Scott Farrar were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, and John Williams was nominated for Best Original Music Score. Steven Spielberg, Jude Law and Williams received nominations at the 59th Golden Globe Awards.
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!scope="row" rowspan=3| Chicago Film Critics Association
| rowspan="3" | February 25, 2002
| Best Supporting Actor
| Jude Law
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| rowspan="3" |
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| Best Original Music Score
| John Williams
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| Best Cinematography
| Janusz Kamiński
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|-
!scope="row" rowspan=4| Empire Awards
| rowspan="4" | February 5, 2002
| Best Film
| A.I. Artificial Intelligence
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| rowspan="4" |
|-
| Best Director
| Steven Spielberg
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| Best Actor
| Haley Joel Osment
|
|-
| Best Actress
| Frances O'Connor
|
|-
!scope="row" rowspan=3| Golden Globes
| rowspan="3" | January 20, 2002
| Best Director
| Steven Spielberg
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| rowspan="3" |
|-
| Best Supporting Actor
| Jude Law
|
|-
| Best Original Score
| John Williams
|
|-
!scope="row" rowspan=7| Saturn Awards
| rowspan="7" | June 10, 2002
| Best Science Fiction Film
| A.I. Artificial Intelligence
|
| rowspan="7" |
|-
| Best Director
| rowspan="2" | Steven Spielberg
|
|-
| Best Writing
|
|-
| Best Actress
| Frances O'Connor
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|-
| Best Performance by a Younger Actor
| Haley Joel Osment
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|-
| Best Special Effects
| Dennis Muren, Scott Farrar, Michael Lantieri, Stan Winston
|
|-
| Best Music
| John Williams
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|-
!scope="row" rowspan=2| Young Artist Awards
| rowspan="2" | April 7, 2002
| Best Leading Young Actor
| Haley Joel Osment
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| rowspan="2" |
|-
| Best Supporting Young Actor
| Jake Thomas
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|-
|}
American Film Institute nominated the film in AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores.
See also
- List of underwater science fiction works
Notes
References
Bibliography
External links
- Official Warner Bros. Site