How Shia LaBeouf Destroyed His Relationship With Steven Spielberg

Actor Shia LaBeouf has fallen far from his 2000s heyday, mainly due to a series of abuse allegations and arrests for harassment, disorderly conduct and battery. LaBeouf has spent the past few years attempting to rehabilitate his image, including a 2-hour-long interview on Jon Bernthal’s podcast in 2022 where he talked about his path to sobriety and his many regrets. 

LaBeouf has also apologized for a more trivial offense: his trash-talking of director Steven Spielberg in the aftermath of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” The 2008 film, which had originally promised to revive the franchise and maybe even set up LaBeouf’s character as the Indiana Jones of the new generation, was a critical disappointment, and LaBeouf didn’t handled it well at the time.

“You get there, and you realize you’re not meeting the Spielberg you dream of,” LaBeouf said in a 2016 interview. “You’re meeting a different Spielberg, who is in a different stage in his career. He’s less a director than he is a f**king company.” Two months later, LaBeouf apologized for the remarks, saying, “I f**k up sometimes … I probably could’ve gone lighter on Spielberg, that was probably something I should’ve backed off of.” 

A lot of LaBeouf’s comments towards the director seem the result of him talking too bluntly about his personal issues without consideration for how he’s dragging others into it. “The actor’s job is to make it come alive and make it work,” he said about “Crystal Skull” in a 2010 interview. “And I couldn’t do it. So that’s my fault.” It seems clear that LaBeouf was mostly just mad at himself for not being able to fully capitalize on his multiple gigs with Spielberg, but he expressed that regret in the least productive way possible.

LaBeouf worked on a ton of other projects produced by Spielberg in the 2000s (like “Eagle Eye,” “Transformers,” and “Disturbia”) but the collaborations stopped abruptly around 2010. Part of that seemed the result of LaBeouf badmouthing Spielberg to the press, but most of it was likely the result of LaBeouf’s increasing reputation as an unreliable, volatile person to work with. LaBeouf still gets some good movie roles in these days, like “Honey Boy” in 2019 and the upcoming “Megalopolis” from director Francis Ford Coppola, but these projects are now few and far between. 

The clearest sign that things are dead between LaBeouf and Spielberg came in 2023’s “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” Spielberg didn’t direct this film but he did co-produce it, and the movie’s treatment of LaBeouf’s character Mutt sure seems mean spirited. You know how “Crystal Skull” ended with Mutt picking up Indiana Jones’ hat, implying (if just for a moment, before Indy takes it away) that he might one day lead the franchise? Well, “Dial of Destiny” goes a different route: it establishes that Mutt’s been killed off-screen, dying in Vietnam even though Indy warned him not to sign up for it. 

It’s a baffling end for a once-important character, an odd example of the franchise almost completely disowning everything the previous movie set up. Would it have happened if LaBeouf hadn’t spent the years after “Crystal Skull” insulting the director? It’s impossible to say for sure, but it certainly didn’t help.