Liking Tom Cruise is Mission Impossible

Tom Cruise's highly public courtship of Katie Holmes may have wearied fans. Picture / Reuters

The received wisdom in Hollywood for the past week has been near-unanimous: The first big blockbuster of the season, Mission: Impossible III, is a commercial disappointment, and it's all the fault of star Tom Cruise.

Variety, the showbiz bible, declared right after last weekend's opening box-office figures appeared that audiences had grown "weary of Tom Cruise's pervasive media presence, from his chair-hopping antics on the Oprah show to his ongoing advocacy for Scientology".

The New York Times wondered "if the real mission isn't ... the resurrection of a screen attraction who has, of late, seemed a bit of a freak".

Screenwriter Nora Ephron went further, dubbing Cruise "the new Michael Jackson, a weirdo ... a poster-boy for career immolation, a bizarre case of arrested development".

All this might have made sense if M:I 3 had been a flop like, say, The Island, last year's non-blockbuster. But it took US$63 million ($101.5 million) worldwide, including US$47 million in the United States, although the US figure was lower than Paramount Studios had hoped, given its vast budget and exceptionally wide opening on more than 4000 screens.

But the latest instalment in the adventures of Ethan Hunt and his team left the multiplexes anything but empty. It also did roaring business in Asia.

The prospects are far from shabby for this weekend, too, since the only competition in the US is Wolfgang Petersen's remake of The Poseidon Adventure, which is expected to flop. M:I 3's reviews were pretty good, all things considered, earning praise for both the action sequences and Philip Seymour Hoffman as the chief villain. So Paramount executives are not alone in thinking they will reap further rewards before consigning it to DVD.

The question then arises: Why is the received wisdom so wrong? The problem, of course, is not with the film as much as with perceptions of Tom Cruise. There's no arguing he has made a spectacle of himself in the past year - starting with his ludicrously over-dramatised courtship of Katie Holmes, all the way up to the birth of a daughter last month.

He allowed his adherence to Scientology to alienate both his fan base and the usually fawning news media, which were aghast at his dismissals of psychiatric medicine and a very personal attack on Brooke Shields, who had publicly discussed her postnatal depression.

It doesn't seem unreasonable, then, to conclude that the critics and entertainment writers were almost willing him to fail. USA Today even commissioned a Gallup poll to gauge public opinion of Cruise, as though he were a politician.

In response, a clutch of Cruise's powerful Hollywood friends - the chiefs of Paramount and Universal, and action film producer Jerry Bruckheimer - came out to express support. "If you do US$118 million in a three-day period around the world, you're to be congratulated," Paramount chairman Brad Grey argued.

The moguls have reason to be unnerved by the wave of anti-Cruise sentiment. Male leads are unusually thin on the ground, especially ones who can "open" a big-budget extravaganza on the strength of their name alone. Cruise has been a reliable member of the A-list for a long time, and they all desperately want to keep him there.

New York Times reviewer Manohla Dargis had the canniest piece of advice. "Once upon a Hollywood time, the studios carefully protected their stars from the press and the public. Now the impossible mission, it seems, is protecting them from themselves."

- INDEPENDENT


* OUR VERDICT "M:I 3 is the best and most satisfying of the trilogy ... better villain, bigger bang and just enough fun with those original M:I gimmicks"

- by Russell Baillie, entertainment editor