How many movies have Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks made together?
Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks are two figures in the film industry with cachet to burn, having each made dozens of great movies down the decades. Yet the pair are noted for their work together on numerous projects as well. Any studio investor who sees both the names Spielberg and Hanks on a production proposal must think it’s their lucky day.
Hanks first collaborated with Spielberg after sharing an initial script with him for the 1998 film Saving Private Ryan. Hanks was already aboard the project, which bizarrely had Transformers director as its first choice at the helm. It was only the intervention of Hanks, once Bay had wisely decided the movie wasn’t for him to direct, that led to Spielberg agreeing to take it on.
The two had almost worked together before, near the beginning of Hanks’ acting career in 1986. But Spielberg decided to pass on directing the actor in his first Oscar-nominated role as overgrown 12-year-old Josh Baskin in Big. Imagine the different trajectories their respective careers might have taken if this landmark collaboration had happened over a decade before it finally did.
Still, they got together eventually. And with Saving Private Ryan proving to be a huge success in cinemas, there was no going back. A year later, the two of them worked with each other again as the main producers of a TV miniseries they’d conceived of called Band of Brothers. Like their first joint cinematic venture, the series follows a group of soldiers through France and Germany in World War Two. They’ve subsequently produced two more series along the same lines: 2010’s The Pacific, which follows a company of seafaring US Marines, and 2024’s Masters of the Air, about a US Air Force squadron.
What about the movies?
Yet this trio of limited series doesn’t technically count as cinema. If we look strictly at how many movies Hanks and Spielberg have made together, then the answer is that fewer than many would imagine.
In addition to Saving Private Ryan, there’s comedy thriller Catch Me If You Can, in which Hanks plays FBI detective Carl Hanratty tracking conman Frank Abagnale Jr. Then there’s 2004’s sentimental airport-based comedy The Terminal. And the Hanks-Spielberg collection is rounded out by the 2015 historical drama Bridge of Spies and the 2017 political history The Post.
That makes a total of five feature films that the two cinematic giants have worked together on, over the course of two decades. We’ll have to wait and see if there are more in the pipeline.
