20 Years Ago, Tom Cruise Nearly Derailed One Of Steven Spielberg's Biggest Box Office Hits

(Welcome to Tales from the Box Office, our column that examines box office miracles, disasters, and everything in between, as well as what we can learn from them.)

“He’s such an intelligent, creative partner, and brings such great ideas to the set that we just spark each other. I love working with Tom Cruise.” Those are the words of director Steven Spielberg speaking in the production notes for his 2005 sci-fi blockbuster “War of the Worlds.” An adaptation of the famed H.G. Wells story of the same name, it was the second collaboration between Cruise and Spielberg in just a few years.

“It’s a dream come true for me to be able to work with Steven Spielberg,” Cruise added. “I grew up watching his movies, studying them. I often tease him that I know his movies better than he does!”

It seemed like a match made in heaven. The biggest actor in the world working with the biggest director. “Minority Report” was a big box office hit in 2002. Why not keep the party going? So they did and created an even bigger hit together the second time around. The only problem? Cruise, whose off-screen antics pulled so much focus from the movie itself that it soured the relationship between these two legends for well over a decade.

In this week’s Tales from the Box Office, we’re looking back at “War of the Worlds” 20 years later. We’ll go over how it came to be, what went wrong on set, what went down during the now-infamous press tour, what happened when the movie hit theaters, what happened in the aftermath of its release, and what we can learn from it all these years later. Let’s dig in, shall we?

The movie, as we know i,t centers on a divorced dockworker named Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) who is getting ready for a weekend with his kids, Rachel and Robbie (Dakota Fanning and Justin Chatwin). The visit takes a turn when deadly robotic spaceships emerge as part of an all-out alien invasion. Ray and his family must then make a harrowing journey from New Jersey to Boston to reunite the kids with their mother. s

Cruise and Spielberg were eager to work together again after “Minority Report.” Per the production notes, Cruise visited the director on the set of his Frank Abagnale Jr. biopic “Catch Me If You Can,” and that’s where the reunion clicked. As Cruise explained:

“He mentioned three movies; ‘War of the Worlds’ was the third. We looked at each other and the lights went on. As soon as I heard it, I said ‘Oh my God! “War of the Worlds” — absolutely.’ That was it.”

“I just thought it would be fun to make a really scary movie with really scary aliens, which I had never done before,” Spielberg added, having previously made “E.T.” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” For the story, Spielberg turned to his frequent collaborator David Koepp, who had penned the screenplay for “Jurassic Park.” Koepp revealed in the production notes that, despite the movie’s blockbuster scale, they needed to narrow the focus.

“An invasion of the Earth is such an impossibly large subject that we could never record what that might be like … We needed to go exactly the other way. The more you focus on these three main characters and their dilemmas — their confinement, their lack of information — the more terrible and personal it becomes.

Koepp was working from a previous draft by Josh Friedman. Though interestingly enough, J.J. Abrams was offered the writing gig but passed on it. He would later direct Cruise in “Mission: Impossible III.” Spielberg and Cruise, being seasoned veterans, the production largely went off without a hitch. Paramount Pictures committed a sizable $132 million budget, betting big on this sci-fi epic. Naturally, that meant a massive, global press tour. What could possibly go wrong?

A lot, it turns out. Cruise, at the time, had begun dating the much younger Katie Holmes, who was coming off a sizable role in Christopher Nolan’s “Batman Begins.” That alone was a public spectacle, one that Cruise played into, chaotically so. Cruise famously went on “Oprah” to promote the film, and his couch-jumping insanity relating to Holmes took center stage, diverting attention from the very expensive movie he was a part of.

There was also an infamously tense, unhinged interview with Matt Lauer on “Today” in which they debated Cruise’s devotion to Scientology, with Cruise also expressing skepticism about psychiatry, among other things. It was all fuel for tabloid gossip that dominated the conversation. Spielberg was none too happy about any of it, but one incident was a bridge too far. As a 2007 piece for Vanity Fair explained:

Spielberg felt the actor’s antics had hurt his own movie, 2005’s ‘War of the Worlds.’ Far worse, though, had been an episode when Spielberg told Cruise the name of a doctor who had prescribed medication to a relative and the doctor’s office was subsequently picketed by Scientologists.

Disastrous press tour aside, “War of the Worlds” debuted in the heart of the summer movie season in 2005, right where Spielberg and Cruise belong. It also received largely positive reviews. “A greatest-hits package from our greatest living entertainer, there is almost overmuch to admire here,” Colin Kennedy wrote for Empire Magazine at the time. Paramount just had to hope that what Cruise did on screen would outweigh what he was doing off screen.

“War of the Worlds” hit theaters on the weekend of June 29, 2005, just ahead of the prime Fourth of July weekend. It easily topped the charts, taking in $77 million across the four-day weekend, pulling in a whopping $112.7 million across its first six days of release. At the time, that was a record for both Paramount Pictures and Cruise. The film had to surrender the crown the following weekend to Marvel’s first theatrical attempt at “Fantastic Four,” so its run atop the charts was short-lived.

Still, it hardly mattered in the grand scheme as the film was able to hold its own even as big hits like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Wedding Crashers” arrived to help round out the summer. The powers of Spielberg and Cruise combined remained mighty, even in the face of one of the worst news cycles any A-list celebrity could hope to endure.

“War of the Worlds” finished its run with $234.2 million domestically to go with a whopping $372.5 million internationally for a grand total of $606.8 million worldwide. 

It was the fourth-biggest movie of 2005 globally, trailing “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” ($745 million), “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith” ($849.9 million), and “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” ($895.9 million). To this day, so far as Spielberg’s directorial efforts go, the only movies to make more globally were “Jurassic Park” ($1 billion) and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” ($786.6 million).

It was also the biggest hit of Cruise’s career up to that point until it was dethroned by “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol” ($694 million) in 2011. But that success, in itself, was something of a punctuation mark on a massive public image redemption tour that Cruise had to go on in the aftermath of this movie’s success. Despite it being a huge hit, Cruise’s public image was badly damaged. That’s in no small part why 2006’s “Mission: Impossible III” made a whole lot less than “Mission: Impossible 2” did in 2000.

Cruise went on a bit of an odd run after a falling out with Paramount, starring in “Lions for Lambs,” “Tropic Thunder,” “Valkyrie,” and “Knight and Day.” Perhaps most telling of all, despite the success they enjoyed together, Spielberg never worked with Cruise again. Though neither of them has commented on the feud publicly, there is no question that what went on with this movie’s release damaged relations between these two Hollywood titans.

What’s interesting is how true the old adage “time heals all wounds” often ends up being. Spielberg and Cruise continued to work steadily over the last two decades, with Cruise successfully rehabilitating his image, becoming the premier go-to action maestro of the 2000s thanks to his work as Ethan Hunt in the “Mission” movies. Meanwhile, Spielberg has made everything from “War Horse” to “Ready Player One.”

But when the pandemic closed down movie theaters all over the world five years ago in 2020, everything changed. Come 2021, people like Spielberg and Cruise had to be united in fighting for the survival of theatrical cinema as we know it. The advent of streaming and many of Hollywood’s decisions have threatened to upend everything these filmmakers stand for.

That’s why, when Cruise fought to delay “Top Gun: Maverick” for several years to ensure it got a theatrical release only to go on and make $1.49 billion, becoming one of the biggest movies ever, Spielberg took notice.

“You saved Hollywood’s ass, and you might have saved theatrical distribution. Seriously, ‘Maverick’ might have saved the entire theatrical industry,” Spielberg said to Cruise at the Academy Awards luncheon in February 2023. Their common goal of saving cinema washed away the sins of the past, it seemed. Is it enough for them to consider working together again? Who knows, but it did feel like a bit of a watershed moment given what happened back in the summer of ’05.

Cruise is no longer (at least publicly) the couch-jumping maniac who dominated the headlines in the mid-2000s. Spielberg is now closer to 80 than he is 70, and only has so many years left to continue making movies. There’s something to be said for these two Hollywood titans, whose collaborations were quite successful in burying the hatchet. Spielberg had every right to be mad. Cruise discovered the hard way that he had to make some changes.

Looking back, this is a pivotal movie for both filmmakers, yet it was also one that just felt like a here today, gone tomorrow, gigantic blockbuster hit that used to be much easier to come by. It wasn’t at the time, viewed as one of the best movies either Spielberg or Cruise had produced. Time can often paint things in a fresh light.

“In my memory, there was a slight dismissiveness towards this movie,” Eric Vespe wrote of “War of the Worlds” for /Film in 2022. “With some distance, I think time has been very kind to it.”

Many people may remember Cruise’s antics but more than anything, this movie has endured. The art has endured. Years from now, the press cycle that surrounded its release will probably not be talked about very much. But the movie itself still will be. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s one of the best reminders ever that all of the noise that exists around a movie, in the end, doesn’t matter nearly as much as the movie itself.