Why Spielberg Owns Two Spots on Stephen King's All-Time Favorites List
TL;DR: Stephen King publicly shared his top 10 favorite films on X in September 2025, and Steven Spielberg is the only director to appear twice — with Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). The list reveals a storytelling kinship between two of pop culture's most enduring voices, and both films are widely available on streaming platforms globally.
What do a great horror novelist and the architect of the modern blockbuster actually have in common? More than most people realize — and Stephen King's personal top 10 film list makes the case better than any film school lecture could.
In September 2025, King posted his all-time favorite movies on X, deliberately excluding adaptations of his own work (so no Shawshank Redemption, no Stand by Me, no Misery — which, fair enough, would've felt a bit like grading your own homework). The unranked list spans genres and decades, pulling in Casablanca, Double Indemnity, The Godfather Part II, and Groundhog Day, among others. But the detail that jumped out immediately: Steven Spielberg appears twice. No other director does. He chose Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind — the exact two films that turned Spielberg from a promising TV director into a Hollywood legend.
That's not a coincidence. That's a worldview.
The Two Spielberg Films King Chose, and Why They Matter
Jaws hit theaters on June 20, 1975, ran 124 minutes, and starred Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfuss. Directed by Steven Spielberg, it essentially invented the summer blockbuster as a commercial concept — a film engineered to fill seats in the heat, built on pure, escalating dread. Budget: approximately $9 million. Final box office: over $470 million worldwide. For context, that's roughly equivalent to a $2.5 billion film today.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind followed two years later, in 1977, also directed by Spielberg, also starring Dreyfuss — this time as Roy Neary, an Indiana power company lineman who becomes obsessed with a vision he can't explain. Runtime: 138 minutes. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won two, including Best Cinematography.
Both films share a structural DNA that goes beyond Spielberg's signature camera movements:
- Ordinary protagonist in an extraordinary situation
- Small-town or suburban setting rather than a major metropolis
- Family and community as emotional anchors, not just backdrop
- Dread or wonder built through restraint, not spectacle alone
- Blue-collar or working-class hero at the center of the story
That last point is worth pausing on. Roy Neary isn't a general or a scientist. He's a guy who works for the power company. The aliens in Close Encounters didn't make first contact with a president or a NASA director. They connected with a man who fixes electrical faults in Indiana. King has done this for fifty years in his fiction — the supernatural gift in The Dead Zone belongs to a schoolteacher, the miracles of The Green Mile are witnessed by a prison guard, and the kids who face Pennywise in IT are social outcasts from a small Maine town.
What King's Full List Tells Us About His Taste
What's striking is how little horror appears in King's top 10. The list, as detailed by Screen Rant's breakdown of King's favorites, skews heavily toward the 1970s — six of the ten films come from that decade — and leans into drama, noir, and science fiction as much as anything with a monster in it.
This is the thing nobody mentions when people talk about King as a "horror writer": the man's actual influences are classical Hollywood, hard-boiled crime fiction, and character-driven drama. Casablanca and Double Indemnity on the same list as Jaws tells you a lot. He's not chasing scares — he's chasing emotional truth wrapped in genre.
Spielberg's Jaws fits that model perfectly. The shark is almost beside the point. The film is really about three men — a bureaucrat, a fisherman, and a scientist — working through their fears and their egos on a boat. The famous Indianapolis speech, delivered by Robert Shaw, is one of the finest pieces of acting in any genre film ever made. Full stop.
Spielberg's Own Words on His "Spiritual Connection" to King
The admiration runs both ways, and Spielberg has been explicit about it. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly in 2018, Spielberg said — and this quote has been floating around cinephile circles ever since:
"I don't know how Stephen King and I aren't related by blood. I really think Stephen and I have a spiritual connection in terms of the movies and the stories we love to tell."
That's not promotional fluff. Spielberg said it in the context of discussing a collaboration that almost happened — he revealed in the same interview that he'd nearly gotten King to co-write the script for Poltergeist (1982), before what he called a "communication breakdown" derailed it. Hard to say if that film would've been better or worse with King's fingerprints on it, but the fact that Spielberg reached for King specifically when he needed a horror writer tells you everything about who he considered a peer.
According to reporting referenced by No Film School's analysis of King's cinematic influences, King's storytelling framework has long borrowed from cinematic structure — his novels often read like screenplays in prose form, with precise scene-setting and visceral pacing that translates almost naturally to the screen.
How Indian Audiences Can Stream Both Spielberg Classics Right Now
For viewers in India, both films are accessible — though platform availability shifts, so it's worth checking a real-time tracker like Movie OTT to confirm current listings before you sit down.
Here's the general streaming picture for Indian audiences as of mid-2026:
- Jaws — Available on Netflix India and periodically on Amazon Prime Video India; also available for digital rental via Apple TV and Google Play Movies
- Close Encounters of the Third Kind — Available on Amazon Prime Video India; rental options through YouTube Movies and Apple TV
Both films carry English audio as the primary track. Jaws has been dubbed in Hindi for certain broadcast releases, which makes it reasonably accessible for audiences who prefer regional language viewing. Neither film carries an Indian theatrical history in the traditional sense — they predate the current multiplex era — but both have built enormous cult followings among Indian cinephiles, particularly in the context of film school education and classic Hollywood retrospectives.
The Indian OTT market has seen significant appetite for classic Hollywood titles in the past two years, with platforms like Netflix and Prime actively expanding their classic library sections. Movie OTT's where-to-watch tracker covers both titles with region-specific availability for India, the US, the UK, and Spain.
Spielberg's Early Career and the Films That Built the Blockbuster Era
Steven Spielberg was born on December 18, 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio. He began directing television in the late 1960s before Duel (1971) — a TV movie about a driver being stalked by a faceless truck — announced him as someone with genuine command of cinematic tension. Jaws was only his third theatrical feature.
Richard Dreyfuss, who stars in both of King's chosen Spielberg films, was 27 when Jaws was released. His performance as oceanographer Matt Hooper — nervous, intellectual, slightly out of his depth — grounds the film's more operatic elements. Roy Scheider as Police Chief Brody is the emotional center: a man afraid of the water who has to go in it anyway. Robert Shaw's Quint is, frankly, one of cinema's great supporting performances.
Close Encounters gave Dreyfuss a different register entirely — less reactive, more obsessive, a man being pulled toward something he can't name. The film's final act, the light-and-music contact sequence at Devils Tower, remains one of the most purely cinematic sequences Spielberg ever shot.
Movie OTT's classic Hollywood archive has full streaming details for both titles across all four of our primary markets.
What Comes Next for the King-Spielberg Conversation
The two men have never made a film together. Given Spielberg's current focus on producing rather than directing — and King's ongoing work in television adaptations — it's unlikely that changes soon. But the cultural conversation around both of them isn't slowing down.
King's X post from September 2025 generated significant engagement, with film writers and fans reassessing both Jaws and Close Encounters through the lens of King's own storytelling philosophy. Expect that conversation to continue as new King adaptations keep arriving on streaming platforms. For the latest on where to watch both Spielberg classics — and any new King projects as they land — Movie OTT has current availability across India, the US, the UK, and Spain updated in real time.
Two films. One list. A friendship that never made it to a set. That's the story.
