Everybody Loves Tom Cruise. Except You.

When most people make a film that takes $48 million in its opening weekend, it's cause for celebration. But when Tom Cruise does it, people are ready to declare him yesterday's news.

Mission: Impossible III opened on Friday to slightly lower than expected ticket sales, and the official Tom Cruise backlash began in earnest. Not that it's a real surprise - ordering your girlfriend to give birth in total silence isn't exactly the express route to box office glory - but now Hollywood has countered the backlash by sending out the bigwigs to defend Tom Cruise to the hilt.

And when the guy behind Kangaroo Jack speaks up for Tom Cruise, the world listens, y'hear?

Despite appearing on TV non-stop for a month yakking about how brilliant getting blown up into a car is, the latest Tom Cruise movie, Mission: Impossible III, was a kind of box office disappointment - taking up to $25 million less than estimated. Why Mission: Impossible III didn't live up to expectations is fairly obvious; why pay £7 to watch Tom Cruise running around in China when you have been able to get so much Tom Cruise craziness for free lately?

What's better - seeing Tom Cruise in a speedboat or hearing about how how Tom Cruise wants Katie Holmes give birth in silence so that he can eat the placenta in peace? Tom Cruise shouting at Truman Capote or Tom Cruise jumping on furniture, doing handstands on pianos, yammering about babies and forcing his exhausted girlfriend to get fit so that she looks nice when they get married? No contest, really.

All this has ensured that Tom Cruise's popularity has waned dramatically in the last year - with 51% of cinemagoers apparently having an unfavourable opinion of him. But Hollywood bigwigs are sticking by Tom, and have come out in force to remind us that Tom Cruise isn't just an irritatingly self-satisfied Scientologist, but a filmstar who shouts and runs all the time, too. Ron Meyer, a former agent of Tom's, told Reuters:

"Tom Cruise is one of the most important stars ever in the motion
picture business. I don't know anybody who has had the consistent success rate
that Tom has. And nobody should be counting him out."

Brad Gray, Paramount head, added:

"He is clearly, on a profit basis as well as a creative basis, one of the biggest stars in the world."

While Jerry Bruckheimer called Tom Cruise "a very passionate guy," and Tom's production partner Paula Wagner noted that Mission: Impossible III was "the biggest non-holiday opening for a Tom Cruise movie ever."

So it's official - Hollywood is still backing Tom Cruise. Until they realise that The Few, the Tom Cruise WWII fighter pilot movie, is the worst idea in all of cinema. Then he'll be out on his freaking ear.

Read more:

Hollywood Friends Rally Round Tom Cruise - Reuters

[story by Stuart Heritage]