Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story
In Mission: Impossible III, the third film in the legendary action franchise, Tom Cruise tells his fictional wife that she must kill him before he does. It’s a typical Cruise conundrum: The villain has planted an explosive device in his head, and to disable it, his wife must use a homemade defibrillator that will stop the bomb but also stop his heart. Luckily, the wife, played by Michelle Monaghan, is a nurse. (The early scenes of her smiling at the medical staff are not wasted.) She bravely electrocutes her husband, pauses to shoot the baddies in the room, and then performs CPR on him. He comes back to life and instinctively grabs his gun, ready to fight again.
As we’ve seen over the years, Tom Cruise can do just about anything—fly helicopters, free-climb cliffs, even sing and play guitar. He rarely fails. Yet 2006’s Mission: Impossible III grossed less than $400 million worldwide—not much for its distributor, Paramount. Sumner Redstone, then chairman of Viacom, which owned Paramount, blamed Cruise for the disappointing box office. Before the film’s release, the actor began to publicize his involvement with the Church of Scientology and gave several embarrassing talk show interviews, jumping on Oprah’s couch and ranting about psychiatry to Matt Lauer on the Today show. (“Do you know what Adderall is? Do you know Ritalin? Do you now understand that Ritalin is a street drug?” Cruise asked Lauer, with an intensity that would make amphetamine users jealous.) Redstone estimated that Cruise’s antics cost Mission: Impossible III $150 million in lost ticket sales, and later that year, Paramount announced it was ending its long-term relationship with the star. “We don’t believe that someone who is committing creative suicide and hurting the company’s bottom line should be on a movie set,” Redstone told the Wall Street Journal.
Before that, Cruise was considered a box office magnet. In 1996, he became the first actor to star in five consecutive films that grossed more than $100 million at the U.S. box office. He was also considered one of the preeminent dramatic actors of his generation, working with directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, and Paul Thomas Anderson. Cameron Crowe, director of the romantic comedy Jerry Maguire, noted Cruise’s unique ability to deliver heartfelt dialogue that might seem out of place in another actor. In an interview with Deadline, Crowe admitted that he was worried about the line Cruise utters at the film’s climax—“You complete me”—and considered cutting it. But on the day of shooting, Crowe recalled, “he showed up, and with so much care, this heavyweight was ready to knock him out. He said it tenderly.” Everyone on set burst into tears.
Cruise seemed destined to win an Oscar. In 1990, he was nominated for his performance in Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July, and later received nominations for Jerry Maguire and Anderson’s Magnolia. He won Golden Globes for all three, but was rejected by the Academy. After splitting with Paramount in 2006, Cruise began taking more creative risks. In 2007’s Lions for Lambs, a slow-moving political drama, he played a neoconservative senator obsessed with winning the War on Terror. In 2008, he starred in Valkyrie as German Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, who tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Valkyrie was an anti-Nazi biopic released on Christmas Day; in other words, it was Oscar bait. But even so, he did not receive a single nomination.
“Valkyrie” was the final spurt. After that, the actor abandoned prestige roles entirely. Since then, he's appeared in fourteen films, thirteen of which have been action films. (The one exception was the musical “Rock of Ages,” which is perhaps best left unmentioned.) Most of them were either directed, written, or produced by Christopher McQuarrie, Cruise's creative partner, with whom the actor first worked on “Valkyrie.” In 2011, Paramount reunited with Cruise for a fourth “Mission: Impossible.” Robert Elswit, the film's cinematographer, said the “marching orders” were for Cruise's character to retire at the end of the film and for a new actor like Jeremy Renner to replace him as the face of the franchise. But Cruise invited McQuarrie to the set midway through production, and
Sourse: newyorker.com
