Michael Douglas Believes One Steven Spielberg Decision Cost Him an Oscar

Michael Douglas once shared a surprising story about a run-in with Steven Spielberg during the Cannes Film Festival. Speaking on the Variety series Actors on Actors, Douglas explained that Spielberg was the president of the festival jury that year.

There were rumors floating around that Douglas was a top choice for the best actor trophy, but he believes Spielberg stepped in to stop it. He claimed the director put the kibosh on that simply because the movie was an HBO production, which was viewed as television rather than a real theatrical film.

Douglas felt this was an old-fashioned way of looking at things and argued that the industry needed to change its rules. He told the audience that even if a movie only plays in a cinema for a short time, it should be entitled to be treated as a movie.

At the time, Spielberg was well-known for being a traditionalist who didn’t want streaming services like Netflix to be part of big film awards. He even told ITV back in 2018 that television was a challenge to the big screen, much like it was back in the 1950s when people first started staying home to watch comedies.

To Spielberg, the problem was that big studios were focusing too much on huge blockbusters and not enough on smaller, original stories. He noticed that those smaller films the studios used to make routinely are now going to Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix.

He worried that these platforms were growing by taking away the theatrical experience from some of his filmmaker friends. He felt that many movies were being unceremoniously not given theatrical releases and were instead sent straight to streaming apps like HBO Max.

However, things started to look up for the legendary director when he saw the success of recent hits like Elvis. He mentioned to The New York Times that seeing a movie about a classic icon do so well at the box office gave him a lot of hope.

He was happy to see older audiences returning to theaters and said, I think movies are going to come back. I really do. It seems that even a staunch traditionalist can find reasons to be optimistic about the future of the cinema.

As of this year, Michael Douglas has been enjoying a quieter life after a very busy few years. He recently starred as the titular founding father in the Apple TV+ series Franklin, a performance that many critics called one of the best of his long career.

In mid-2025, he told fans at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival that he has no real intentions of taking on new acting roles right now. He explained that after working for nearly sixty years, he wanted to take a break and focus on his family, although he hasn’t officially retired, just in case a perfect script comes along.

Meanwhile, Steven Spielberg is currently finishing up his latest project, a highly anticipated sci-fi film titled Disclosure Day. The movie, which is scheduled to hit theaters on June 12, is based on an original story by Spielberg himself and was written by his longtime partner David Koepp.

It features a star-studded cast including Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, and Colman Domingo. While the plot is being kept secret, it is rumored to be a massive “event film” about humanity’s first real contact with extraterrestrials, marking a return to the kind of storytelling that made him a household name.

Do you think Steven Spielberg’s upcoming sci-fi epic Disclosure Day will be the movie that finally brings everyone back to the theaters for good? Share your thoughts in the comments.