I love playing the “what if?” game, especially when it comes to major films and incredibly powerful filmmakers. This one is the size of a dinosaur.

Steven Spielberg‘s Jurassic Park is one of my all-time favorite films. It never even crossed my mind that someone else may have ended up adapting the Michael Crichton novel. But what if James Cameron, known for his darker fare such as The Terminator and Aliens, ended up directing?

The filmmaker with the world’s two highest-grossing films under his belt revealed to HuffPost UK that he had always wanted to make the film Jurassic Park, but was beaten to it by Jaws director Steven Spielberg.

“I tried to buy the book rights and he beat me to it by a few hours,” Cameron revealed at the recently-opened “Titanic Museum” in Belfast, where the ship he brought to the big screen was designed and crafted back at the beginning of last century.

He continued: “But when I saw the film, I realized that I was not the right person to make the film, he was. Because he made a dinosaur movie for kids, and mine would have been aliens with dinosaurs, and that wouldn’t have been fair.

“Dinosaurs are for 8-year-olds. We can all enjoy it, too, but kids get dinosaurs and they should not have been excluded for that. His sensibility was right for that film, I’d have gone further, nastier, much nastier.“

Spielberg’s 1993 film, which stars Sam Neill and Laura Dern, is nearly $1 billion worldwide. Universal is post-converting the film for 3-D release on April 5, 2013 – that should tip the iceberg and set the stage for the already announced 3-D remake.