Not everyone wants to take a Cruise

Jon Bonné • Profile

Tom Cruise's impressively bitter split with Paramount has most everyone asking just one question: Which was it, the money or the crazy?

In a juicy smackdown between two massive egos, Cruise — arguably the world's biggest movie star, certainly the most well-paid — was summarily sent packing by his longtime studio.  No less a figure than Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone, who in sheer influence can be considered the media-mogul equivalent of Cruise, aired this beef in the most public of ways.

“It's nothing to do with his acting ability, he's a terrific actor,” Redstone told the Wall Street Journal. “But we don't think that someone who effectuates creative suicide and costs the company revenue should be on the lot.”

Even a recluse who makes wallpaper from “Top Gun” posters could easily parse Redstone. It wasn't just that Cruise can't get a moment in the spotlight without a Scientology joke being floated. It wasn't that his romance to Katie (make that Kate) Holmes was so shamelessly public, so seemingly contrived at times, that nearly everyone smelled a rat amid the five-carat diamonds.

Even on the spectrum of eccentricity, there is such a thing as going too far. As Redstone told it, Paramount felt that Oprah couch-jumping, picking fights with “glib” Matt Lauer about Ritalin and having the former Mr. Mapother generally appearing in public like an adrenalin-infused neurotic couldn't possibly be helping them sell movie tickets.  Even if Cruise managed to personally egg the door of every single American, he'd still be big in Japan, and yet while “Mission: Impossible III” didn't completely tank, it was lukewarm even at the global box office. True, $393 million is nothing to sneer at — but when your marquee star has a lucrative development deal, a 20 percent cut of box office and a hefty portion of DVD revenue, it does start to look like chump change.

So what's really up? Let's consider five theories:

1) It really was about the money. Certainly, numbers don't lie, and if the second “M:I” film grossed $545 million around the world, Redstone's calculation that Cruise cost the studio $100-150 million is a matter of simple arithmetic.  You have to believe that a third-time franchise would score as big as a previous sequel, but we'll get to that in a moment. It's not just a matter of losing the money, because if Paramount really thought this was a minor downturn that could be righted, Redstone would have found a way to make a deal.

Cruise and moviemaking partner Paula Wagner have scored the studio $2.5 billion since they walked onto the lot in 1992, and if Paramount had any reason to think Cruise could rebound, the deal would have been cut. (If you consider that Paramount was reportedly offering them some $2 million a year, down from $10 million, it's not hard to read the implicit message. A $8 million cut is a pretty hard smackdown.)

2) “M:I:III”? Yeah, right. It's easy to pin this on Cruise overall, but when he had the right project, there was money to be made.  “War of the Worlds”?  Add Steven Spielberg, a decent script (we're ignoring the tripods-catch-a-fatal-cold thing) and some killer effects, and nearly $590 million global box office materializes. No matter how big the blockbuster, a third-time sequel doesn't exactly scream “must see” unless it involves Mr. T and a theme song by Survivor. OK, not even then. Of course, “War” was released nearly a year before “M:I:III,” and the timing there is crucial. The couch-jumping and Brooke Shields catfight all emerged as “War” was being released, but it was still sort of funny and at least halfway interesting at that point.  The really unsettling part of Cruise's behavior didn't come until we'd all had several months to watch Katie's pregnancy, hear tales of familial infighting, and finally watch (or not watch) as the mysterious Suri was birthed, possibly in silent fashion.  All of which takes us to ...

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