Tom Cruise is probably most famous for publicly falling in love with the girl from Dawson's Creek, getting her knocked up and then hiding the baby from everyone except for David Beckham. But – get this – apparently Tom Cruise also makes movies.
That is to say that Tom Cruise made movies, and he made them with giant movie studio Paramount. But that's all to stop now – Paramount has announced that it is ending its 14-year-old relationship with Tom Cruise. And what reason did Paramount give for showing Tom Cruise the door? Perhaps the disappointing box office takings of Mission: Impossible III, or maybe Tom Cruise and Paramount had just naturally reached the organic end of their working relationship? No. The reason that Paramount has given for dumping Tom Cruise is that he's such a fucking loon.
Break-ups are never easy, are they? For all the claims of happiness and enduring love, there's always a suspicion that the bastard was banging a porn star behind your back. And that's when things turn bitter. For 14 years, Tom Cruise and Paramount Pictures had a wonderful relationship; Paramount would give Tom Cruise millions and millions of dollars and Tom Cruise would think of a new variation on the 'flawed hero who comes good and whoops a lot' theme and earn Paramount a gigantic stack of money back.
But things have turned sour between Tom Cruise and Paramount, and yesterday Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone announced that Paramount was giving Tom Cruise the boot. Oddly enough, the split doesn't seem to have too much to do with the disappointing box office returns from Mission: Impossible III. In fact, Redstone seems to want to finish things because of Tom Cruise's kooky off-screen reputation:
"As much as we like him personally, we thought it was wrong to renew his deal. His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount."
Recent conduct? What kind of recent conduct could Redstone be talking about? Surely not Tom Cruise couch jumping, or Tom Cruise shouting down psychiatric drugs on TV, or Tom Cruise proposing to Katie Holmes in Paris then getting her pregnant then ordering her to have a silent birth then eating the placenta then hiding the baby away and only showing David Beckham. Surely not that – those are the actions of a completely normal man, aren't they?
Surprisingly enough, Paula Wagner – who is Tom Cruise's production partner when he's not busy jumping up and down on cars in Japan shouting "I'm the craziest man in the world!" – doesn't seem too impressed at being given the elbow by Paramount:
"I don't understand why this would be turned into a personal attack. Because that's what it is. That's letting one of your greatest assets walk out the door. It looks like bad business to me. We had ceased negotiations. I'm not sure why this happened. You need to respect your artists. This isn't respectful to me. It's not something that dignifies a response."
Of course, you can't help feeling that if Tom Cruise had agreed to take a bit of a pay-cut, as Paramount apparently offered him, then Paramount wouldn't really have minded if Tom had fired Suri Cruise out of a cannon into a concrete wall, but a split's a split – and it might even be beneficial to Tom Cruise in the long run. Now that he's free from the commercial shackles of Paramount, Tom Cruise can now set up an independent outfit with Paula Wagner and finally get to fulfill his dream of playing the great lord Xenu, smashing the life out several suspiciously Sumner Redstone-looking thetans in his nine-hour Scientology epic.
Read more:
Cruise Not Of Paramount Importance – USAToday
[story by Stuart Heritage]
sweetnsour says
Whats really paramount is when did Cruise part with his brain & sanity? Maybe its not too late for him to start doing films that appeal exclusively to his Gay following, human or alien. Insertion impossible (or possible with aid of a probe), Top hung gun, no wait Top Gun was already Gay enough, oh and dont forget that faggity white sailor uniform & constant fingering of his baseball bat in a few good men. I mean that script was not just flirting but yearning out to be a gay film with all those soilders.