Paramount Wasn't Tom Cruise's Boss
Cruise Fired? Paramount Wasn't His Boss
Still trying to figure out how this "Paramount Fires Tom Cruise" thing got so much play? Me, too.
For one thing, Paramount isn't the boss of Cruise. They may be upset about the numbers for "Mission: Impossible 3" not living up to expectations, but the studio has rarely been home to films starring Cruise anyway.
Indeed, Paramount was lucky that "War of the Worlds," Cruise’s most recent film prior to 'M:I3,' was his biggest ever. "War" did $234 million in the end, absolutely the best ever for a Cruise project.
Yet most $100 million Cruise films were made — with the exception of the mystifying "Vanilla Sky" — elsewhere.
"Collateral" was Dreamworks, "Minority Report" came from 20th Century Fox, "The Last Samurai" was Warner Bros., "Eyes Wide Shut" — a huge disaster — was also from Warner’s. "Jerry Maguire," still Cruise’s best film in a decade, was at Columbia Pictures.
The Paramount production deal, which is what Cruise was “fired” from, is a different matter. As has been pointed out in trade publications, keeping Cruise and partner Paula Wagner around on the lot in case they had a good idea — at the price of $3 million a year — was a gamble that didn’t quite pay off.
Their biggest hit was "The Others," starring Tom’s just-ex, Nicole Kidman. It grossed $96 million, but for Miramax, not Paramount.
It’s hard to see why Paramount was shelling out that annual premium. Their output was slim. The non-Tom releases were Robert Towne's "Ask the Dust (which would have been a Paramount release anyway based on old relationships), "Elizabethtown" (a gift to Cameron Crowe after "Jerry Maguire" and "Vanilla Sky") and "Narc" (a not-bad idea if it had been at Miramax or Lions Gate). These movies were huge losers.
"Vanilla Sky," another loser obscured by a $100 million box office, was also theirs, and did nothing but launch the alleged romance of Cruise and Penelope Cruz.
But production deals with big stars have always been like that. They’re created for prestige, as in “We have Tom Cruise on the lot.”
They rarely work, except in the case of Clint Eastwood’s long relationship with Warner Bros. — and even now that seems slightly imperiled.
The rule is: Stars do not make good film producers. They rarely make good directors. Behind-the-scenes people do the work
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