War of the Worlds (2005 film) War of the Worlds (2005 film) War of the Worlds is a 2005 American science-fiction action disaster film directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Josh Friedman and David Koepp, loosely based on the 1898 novel of the same title by H. G. Wells and jointly produced and released by Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures. It stars Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Justin Chatwin, Miranda Otto and Tim Robbins, with narration by Morgan Freeman. In the film, an American dock worker is forced to look after his children, from whom he lives separately, as he struggles to protect them and reunite
The War of the Worlds (radio drama) to hoax broadcasts that "the anecdotal nature of such reporting makes it difficult to objectively assess the true extent and intensity of the panic. Bartholomew sees this as yet more evidence that the panic was predominantly a creation of the newspaper industry. In a study published in book form as "The Invasion from Mars" (1940), Princeton professor Hadley Cantril calculated that some six million people heard "The War of the Worlds" broadcast. He estimated that 1.7 million listeners believed the broadcast was an actual news bulletin and, of those, 1.2 million people were frightened or disturbed. Media historians Jefferson Pooley