What caused Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise’s relationship to break down?
At the Oscar nominees luncheon in February 2023, Steven Spielberg took it upon himself to thank Hollywood’s last remaining movie star for saving the cinema business. Addressing Tom Cruise, the director gushed, “You saved Hollywood’s ass, and you might have saved theatrical distribution. Seriously, Top Gun: Maverick might have saved the entire theatrical industry.”
It was a nice moment for two Hollywood legends to pat each other on the back, but many observers mightn’t have known that it was also a “bury the hatchet” scenario for the former collaborators. You see, they’ve supposedly been engaged in a bitter feud for most of the past two decades.
In the 2000s, Spielberg and Cruise teamed up for a pair of hugely acclaimed sci-fi blockbusters: Minority Report in 2002 and War of the Worlds in 2005. While the first movie went off without a hitch, problems began to appear during the press circuit for the adaptation of HG Wells’ seminal novel.
This was the now-infamous press tour during which Cruise let himself get a bit too weird in public. When he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, he infamously leapt onto her couch and began jumping up and down while proclaiming his undying love for his new girlfriend, Katie Holmes.
Then Cruise argued with host Matt Lauer on the Today show about the effectiveness of psychiatric drugs. As a Scientologist, Cruise doesn’t believe in using drugs of any kind, and he even criticised Brooke Shields for taking anti-depressants to alleviate her post-partum depression. Lauer clearly wasn’t happy with Cruise’s conduct, and Cruise wasn’t happy with the host, calling him “glib”.
The Mission: Impossible star even lambasted psychiatry as a profession, stating, “You don’t know the history of psychiatry. I do” when Lauer commented that he had clearly done his homework on the subject. When Lauer asked how Cruise could encourage the public to understand Scientology better, he said, “You just communicate about it. If I want to know something, I go and find out. Because I don’t talk about things that I don’t understand.”
Spielberg was reportedly deeply unhappy with Cruise in the wake of this disastrous press tour. It’s believed he felt the star overshadowed the film with his personal eccentricities, and he even felt it hurt the movie’s box office prospects. Worse, though, was an incident in which Cruise’s association with Scientology caused upset for Spielberg’s family.
In 2006, The New Yorker reported that, during a private conversation, Spielberg had some very nice things to say about a psychiatrist who helped one of his family members. The problem, though, was that Spielberg had this chat in the presence of Cruise. When that very same psychiatrist’s office found itself the subject of a protest staged by Scientologists, the finger of accusation couldn’t help turning to the star. For his part, Cruise reportedly assured the director that he had nothing to do with the protest, but it left a bad taste in the mouths of both Spielberg and his wife, Kate Capshaw.
While neither man would ever publicly comment on whether this unfortunate situation led to a true feud, they haven’t worked together since. However, perhaps their reunion in 2023 shows that it’s all water under the bridge now.
