PLEASE JUST LEAVE IT ALONE

Steve, Tom, I love you (well, one of you). But please, don't do it.

Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise will bring "The War of the Worlds" to the bigscreen, with Cruise expected to star.

Depending on how quickly the two get a "War of the Worlds" script they like, the sci-fi epic could start in late 2005. Spielberg is now completing work on "The Terminal" with Tom Hanks and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

David Koepp will rewrite a Josh Friedman-penned first-draft script based on "War," the classic H.G. Wells alien-invasion novel.

Cruise and his C/W Prods. partner Paula Wagner set up the pic at Paramount in May 2002. DreamWorks will come aboard as a partner, now that Spielberg is involved.

Cruise and Wagner will produce, and it is likely Spielberg and DreamWorks Pictures co-heads Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald will be involved in that capacity as well.

"War" became permanently etched in American culture when Orson Welles' Mercury Theater performed the story on radio in 1938 and ignited a nationwide panic when listeners didn't realize it was fiction.

H.G. Wells wrote "The War of the Worlds" in 1898. In addition to the Mercury Theater radio production, the book inspired a 1953 film starring Gene Barry and Les Tremayne.

Producers have been toying with "War" for many years. David Brown persuaded Paramount to commission a script by Anthony Burgess during the Barry Diller regime, but the project didn't gel. Years later, Brown pitched it to Spielberg, resulting ultimately in the development of a related story, "Deep Impact." But, the Wells story was again sidetracked.

Uhh, that's quite a departure from "War" there.

But anyway, I feel like this is a little much. And how can you improve on Mars Attacks! anyway?

But of course, Spielberg knows that hard-and-fast rule: When you need a star for a movie about an alien invasion, it's not a bad idea to go with a scientologist, who's probably knowledgeable about this sort of thing.