THB #707: A Brief Industry History of Tom Cruise

I tweeted about Tom Cruise and the vomiting up of stories about his past that is going on in anticipation of M:I Final Reckoning. Someone suggested I write up my points, so…

A quick career recap before his Mission: Impossible launched.

Became a real movie star with Risky Business in 1983. Opened the first weekend of August and ran at over $1 million a weekend through October 23. Legend flopped for Tom and Ridley Scott… was it over? No. Top Gun opened 30 years ago this weekend, before there were billion dollar movies, and only Ghostbusters and Back To The Future were bigger in that period. He sidekicked Paul Newman,who finally won his Oscar, with Scorsese directing. Then he delivered for the newly resurrected Disney with Cocktail, was one of the Young Guns, and was in the Oscar winning Rainman, all in the same year. Born on the Fourth of July again established his acting chops, though it didn’t deliver the hoped-for Oscars. Days of Thunder was a hit, revived the car racing movie, and delivered redheaded neurosurgeon Claire Lewicki to us in a studio movie after Dead Calm and the era of The First Mrs. Cruise. Far and Away didn’t kill, but wasn’t embarrassing. A Few Good Men, The Firm, and Interview With The Vampire followed… all hits. A stunning decade by any measurement. Not only hit after hit after hit, but Scorsese, Paul Brickman, Barry Levinson, Oliver Stone, Tony (and Ridley) Scott, Ron Howard, Rob Reiner, Sydney Pollack, and Neil Jordan… a murderer’s row of a generation of director.

The first Mission: Impossible movie was in 1996, as was Jerry Maguire. Commercial bait and Oscar bait.

Then The Cruises spent 2 years with Stanley Kubrick as he shot and re-shot and re-shot Eyes Wide Shut. Tom also had his small role in Magnolia, for Paul Thomas Anderson, open that year.

Mission: Impossible II opened in 2000.

Vanilla Sky, a return to Cameron Crowe, felt like a flop in 2001, but wasn’t, as Cruise powered the film to $200 million worldwide at the same time the DVD business was accelerating into major dollars.

Also ending that year, his marriage to Nicole Kidman.

He finally made a film with Spielberg with Minority Report and had another major hit… which got dwarfed by the arrival of Spider-Man and the 2nd films in the Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Star Wars (I-III) franchises. Regardless, it was Cruise’s 3rd biggest grosser, behind only the 2 Mission films, the film was profitable in theatrical, and DVD was super hot in that period.

Next up, Ed Zwick and Michael Mann, respected directors who took Cruise to new places in less aggressively epic films. But Zwick’s The Last Samurai pushed past Minority Report to become #3 in Cruise’s film history at the time with $455 million. And even the dark Collateral did $202 million.

And back to Spielberg with War of the Worlds, which became the highest grosser in Cruise’s history with $604 million worldwide. But as Minority Report’s success seemed smaller because of the changing industry, so was WotW’s. Potter, Star Wars, and Narnia all topped the number worldwide.

Still, Cruise could do no wrong. He seamlessly moved from more serious work to very commercial work and made it all work, almost every single time.

There were rumors about his sexuality, rumors about his Scientology (especially on Spielberg’s Minority Report set), and questions about movie stars in general in the era of CG-driven fantasies.

The industry was also seen as being in flux, as DVD sales were at a large multiple vs theatrical revenue, even with international theatrical expanding. In other words, the DVD sell-thru revenues and profits were much larger than theatrical. Studios were pushing hard for day-n-date releasing… anything to get to the DVD windows more quickly. Meanwhile, the cost of releasing DVDs had grown exponentially, matching and sometimes even surpassing the cost of theatrical releases.

Netflix was profitable for the first time in 2003, shipping DVDs, netting $6.5 million on sales of $272 million. In 2004, they netted $49 million on sales around $500 million.

But a few key events were happening in 2005. The DVD Explosion was quickly cooling for new movie sales while overall DVD sales were being buoyed by massive releases of library product from all the major studio libraries (and all the small ones too). So Seasons 5 - 15 of Bonanza (not researched… just an example) was selling some, but so was every TV series that people had not seen for years and decades. The Sopranos and The Wire and Sex and the City were making a cash-money fortune for HBO… on DVD. New movie release sales could still hit big, but expectations for the non-mega-movies were sliding from a couple million units to a million to half a million and on down.

Meanwhile, over in Glendale, DreamWorks SKG was thriving in many ways, but not enough so to overcome an early massive investment in television at the peak of producers deals. After the earliest years of the studio, most of Spielberg’s films as director were being made by other studios who were footing the bills and taking the profits. Animation was thriving, but the weight of the company has eating those profits.

So they spun DreamWorks Animation off (sound familiar?) and David Geffen made a deal with the newly appointed head of Paramount, Brad Grey, to “buy” the live-action studio at the end of 2005. It was a horrible deal with many consequences to this day… but it’s also, oddly, part of the Tom Cruise story.

Mission: Impossible III, directed by JJ Abrams, was released as the summer opener in 2006. It had the extra gleam of the new Oscar winner, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, co-starring as The Villain. But it opened to $47.7 million, which only looked good compared to the summer before, which opened with Kingdom of Heaven ($19.6m), House of Wax ($12m), and Crash ($9.1m). But in 2004, it was Van Helsing, widely seen as a bomb, opening to $51.7 million. In 2003, it was X2 with $85.6 million. And in 2002, it was Spider-Man, with the first $100 million opening in history ($114.8m)

But that was just the beginning. During the heat of the DVD explosion moment, Cruise’s deal for Mission 3 was made and his agents were, appropriately, killers, and he not only got first dollar gross, but Cruise was set to take a good chunk of the DVD money.

And there was more… the budget on Mission 3, directed by the TV guy, was rumored to be as high as $185 million, something like a 50% increase over the previous Mission movies.