Someone Gives Tom Cruise Loads Of Movie Cash

You can't stop Tom Cruise making movies. Obviously by 'you' we mean 'Sumner Redstone' and by 'making movies' we mean 'playing the same old tired flawed hero role and needlessly shouting everything all the time.'

But we're straying off subject here. Even though Sumner Redstone and his Paramount minions decided to stop working with Tom Cruise less than one week ago, Tom Cruise has already found someone else ready to pump his ego full of money and let him continue making movies. Tom Cruise has teamed up with an investment firm headed by Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder, meaning that the next Tom Cruise movie will probably be about an alcoholic ex American football player who has to overcome his demons for one… last… game against a bunch of aliens who are allergic to sneezing.

This last week has been a weird one for Tom Cruise watchers. Usually when people discuss Tom Cruise they discuss his suspicious baby or his penchant for creepily sneaking up on Steven Spielberg and generally being especially irritating, but hardly ever the business end of his job. However, since Viacom bigwig Sumner Redstone decided to effectively fire Tom Cruise from Paramount - sending the Cruise lawyers into wig-out mode in the procedure - there's been a lot of talk about Tom Cruise's place in the Hollywood star system and declining DVD profit margins and whatnot. Of course, it helped that Redstone showed Tom Cruise the door for basically being a bit of a nutjob.

But Tom Cruise isn't just any old nutjob - Tom Cruise is the most powerful nutjob in the world and so it's easy for Tom Cruise to brush off Sumner Redstone's insults and find some other schmo to pay him loads of money to make films - and that schmo is Daniel Snyder, owner of the Washington Redskins and head of investment group First and Goal LLC. Snyder has agreed to cover all overhead and development costs for Cruise/Wagner Productions for at least two years. No actual figures have been disclosed yet, but Paula Wagner says that it's not really about the money is it:

"This offers us the opportunity to work with all studios and continue doing what we were doing, but in more enhanced ways. This is not a deal about money as much as it is about access and about our futures."

Now all that's left for Tom Cruise to do is to find people ready to, you know, actually pay for some films to be made and distributed and then the Tom Cruise roadshow will be back in action as normal, allowing us to get back to the interesting stuff about how Tom Cruise eats placentas and that.

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Mission accomplished: Cruise finds movie money - Reuters

[story by Stuart Heritage]