Tom Cruise Is Hitler, Or Wants To Kill Hitler, Or Something

There's a saying that says 'a day without Tom Cruise doing something stupid is like a day without sunshine' and if that's true then we've been in the middle of a solar eclipse since Tom Cruise's wedding - but it looks like the sun's coming out again.

Eager to get his public image back on track so he can start being seen as Tom Cruise: Filmstar again instead of Tom Cruise: Deranged Whackjob Religious Cult Midget, Tom Cruise has been carefully handpicking a bunch of carefully-crafted movies that will return him to his spot as a Hollywood megastar. And the latest of these is a film about Hitler and the Nazis directed by the Superman Returns bloke. That's Hitler and the Nazis the WWII baddies we're talking about, not Hitler And The Nazis the ill-advised and quickly-cancelled 1980s Austrian Saturday morning educational puppet show. Obviously.

It's been too long since Tom Cruise was around to brighten up our lives. The good old days - the days of Tom Cruise jumping around on a sofa, of Tom Cruise implausibly getting his virgin girlfriend pregnant, of Tom Cruise ordering his girlfriend to silently give birth so he could gobble down the placenta in peace - seem so long ago now. What have we had lately? Tom Cruise being called Jesus? Pah - that's only small-fry Tom Cruise madness. 

But it looks like that'll be the only Tom Cruise madness we'll see for a while. After the weird Tom Cruise/ Katie Holmes wedding blowout that took such great delight in shunning Oprah, Tom Cruise wants to keep his head down and concentrate on making decent films again. The painful memories of being sacked by Paramount and then told by a very old man that all women hate him still ring in Tom Cruise's ears and, now that he's in charge of United Artists, Tom Cruise has a point to prove.

IMDb lists several new Tom Cruise films as being in production. There's Lions For Lambs, a military film co-starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford; Selling Time, a Spike Lee horror film and Hardy Men, a comedy with Ben Stiller that physically can't be as bad as it sounds. But now Tom Cruise has also signed up for a new movie - a movie about Hitler and the Nazis and WWII and stuff. MSNBC reports:

Tom Cruise is set to star in an untitled thriller based on an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler at the height of World War II. Cruise had not intended to star in the project, which was acquired last week by his United Artists banner. However, during subsequent meetings, the project’s director, Bryan Singer, became intrigued by the notion of Cruise as a central figure in the story and offered him the role. Cruise signed on Tuesday. Production is scheduled to begin early this summer. MGM will distribute. Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander wrote the script. Singer and McQuarrie previously teamed on the Oscar-winning thriller “The Usual Suspects.”

While a gritty drama about a failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler sounds a million miles away from, say War Of The Worlds, at least this untitled WWII movie will give Tom Cruise another shot at doing what he's best at - pre-release movie promotion. To promote Mission: Impossible III Tom Cruise had a baby and then did a weird multivehicular thing around New York for the premiere. We're sure that already Tom Cruise has his best team of people dreaming up a huge Nazi-themed stunt for the release of this new WWII movie. We hear that sort of thing goes down well, especially in Japan.

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Tom Cruise To Star In Hitler Thriller - MSNBC