Paramount Learns that Body Thetans Don’t Buy Movie Tickets

Independent Sources was going to ignore the poor opening week-end of Mission Impossible III until we game across Defamer’s take which (like Katie Holmes) was deserving of reproduction:

Tom Cruise did everything we could ask of our highest-visibility movie star: plucked an actress from semi-obscurity just before the release of one of his blockbusters, scaled the Eiffel Tower to announce his intentions to marry her at an undisclosed future date, immediately pretended to knock her up, confronted various beloved celebrities over any behavior perceived as incompatible with his controversial religion, and, in the globe-circling publicity run-up to a second blockbuster capping an almost solid year of media ubiquity, finally selected a daughter from the baby-patch lovingly cultivated by an army of drones inside the walls of his compound, allowing him to share the joy of alleged biological fatherhood with the world.

As usual, Defamer nailed it raising the question how is Paramount responding to the more-than-soft weekend numbers. It turns out, Paramount is still doing the ‘rope-a-dope’. Case in point, the always-unflappable Rob Moore’s public positioning:

“I don’t believe that [Cruise's off-screen antics] is a factor in how the movie opened.”

Rob, what planet are you from? Teegeeack?

You have to admire Paramount, faced with an opening week-end that even Xenu would admit was soft, they refuse to admit that the bizarro world of Tom Cruise was a factor. Bad openings are typically due to one of two things. Bad marketing on a good film or a bad film that even good marketing was not able to cover up. There has been a lot of criticism of the marketing of this last installment of the ‘franchise’ but the reality is that the first two films were not that good (and I’m being kind) so there just wasn’t all that much pent-up demand for a third one. About $48m it turns out.

And even more to the point, Cruise has increasingly made himself be seen as a couch-jumping, finger-pointing, self-righteous Scientologist first and an action hero second. He continually puts his religion front and center of the movies he is acting in. But unfortunately for Tom and Paramount, Scientology does not equate to big box office. Just look at the box office results of Battlefield Earth.

Things are only going to get tougher for Cruise. He’s been able to get away with his antics in part because people fear offending the biggest star in the galaxy. But Cruise’s power is the result of his ability to make money for others and that is now becoming increasingly in question. Spielberg will think twice before working with him and watch that spread to other power players who just don’t want the risk or head-aches associated with casting him. Even the average Joe is getting fed up with him and many consider him crossing the line when he attacked Brooke Shields (who many will always see as the young, innocent girl in “Blue Lagoon.”).

Unless dead space aliens start buying movie tickets or at least DVDs*, Cruise is going to be in for one hell of a backlash that will make being dropped into a volcano strapped to a hydrogen bomb seem like a picnic.

Update: This poll just in and more American have an “unfavorable” opinion of Tom Cruise than a “favorable” opinion

When 1,013 adults were asked their opinion of Cruise, 35% were favorable and 51% unfavorable. Nearly a year ago, when War of the Worlds opened on July 4 weekend to $77 million, the rating was 58% favorable and 31% unfavorable. (Sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.)

tags: scientology Tom Cruise mission impossible paramount

(*given their advanced technology they probably use Bit-Torrent anyway).

This entry was posted on Monday, May 8th, 2006 at 12:32 pm by Insider and is filed under How Not To Succeed In Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.