Viacom Vs. Tom Cruise
by Andre Soares
Hardly "alternative film" news, and hardly "news," period, at this point …
… But after 14 years of marriage, Paramount — following orders from 83-year-old Viacom top dog Sumner Redstone — has split up with Cruise/Wagner, the film company owned by Tom Cruise and his former agent, Paula Wagner. For those not in the know, the Viacom octopus owns Paramount, DreamWorks, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Showtime, Infinity Broadcasting, Simon & Schuster, United Cinemas International, and a number of other media-related businesses. It also has close ties to CBS, with which Viacom was fully associated until recently. (The Columbia Journalism Review has a list of Viacom-owned businesses and a company timetable that goes up to 2004.)
Redstone claims in a Wall Street Journal article that Cruise’s public behavior in the last year or so — referred to as "creative suicide" — has damaged the box-office take of his latest film, Mission: Impossible III, which earned a — ahem — paltry US$390 million worldwide. And never mind the fact that Cruise’s previous film, War of the Worlds, which opened at the height of the Cruise-Katie Holmes-couch-jumping-on-Oprah-Scientology-Brooke-Shields-and-anti-depressants-etc. controversy, has reportedly earned $591 million worldwide, while boasting Cruise’s biggest U.S. opening weekend ever. So much for Cruise’s off-screen behavior affecting his box-office standing.
Redstone, sounding more like a spurned lover than the much-too-powerful head of a much-too-powerful global conglomerate, went public in a manner that was aptly described by Paula Wagner in the Los Angeles Times: "It is graceless. It is undignified. It’s not businesslike." In Daily Variety, Wagner stated that in the last six years the Cruise/Wagner movies have accounted for 32 percent of Paramount’s theatrical revenue, and she also claimed that she and Cruise were the ones who stopped negotiating with Paramount, after having secured independent financing from two hedge funds worth more than $100 million. Considering Redstone’s below-the-belt remarks, Wagner could well be telling the truth. (Some sources have stated that the Paramount-Cruise deal had given most of the profits to the actor, leaving Paramount with the crumbs. According to that scenario, the studio wanted a larger slice of the Cruise revenue cake.)
Now, imagine if Tom Cruise had come out as, say, being gay, or anti-Iraq war (in the days when it wasn’t fashionable), or — gasp — a devout Muslim, or anything else that might truly have affected his box-office standing. Would Redstone have been as blunt in his public criticism of Cruise’s behavior? That’s quite possible, especially considering that such public humiliations might serve as a lesson to others: Take your money and shut up. Also, with a net worth of US$7.7 billion and with the Viacom empire under his thumb, Redstone can afford to say — and most probably do — whatever the hell he wishes.
If only Cruise had behaved like a real businessman. He could have claimed to be a "liberal Democrat" while pushing for Republican George W. Bush during the 2004 U.S. presidential election because that was in the best interest of U.S.-based media conglomerates such as Viacom. That role, however, was played by Redstone himself. (Perhaps not coincidentally, the year before the election Viacom’s Showtime presented the made-for-cable movie DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, a propaganda piece designed to fool viewers into believing that Bush was a tough leader with brains to match.)
The box office receipts of Paramount films were not affected by Redstone’s stance. But who cares about political partisanship in the media, of the sort that could actually change world history (and no, I’m not referring to just a stupid cable movie), when you have a war of the words between the star of Top Gun and the star of The Blue Lagoon?
In any case, Tom Cruise is welcome to come work for me any time he wishes — as long as:
- I don’t have to invest more than few hundred bucks on his projects
- I get a sizable percentage of the sure-to-come profits
- I don’t have to watch any of his films
At Forbes, Lea Goldman offers an insightful analysis of the Paramount-Cruise split in "Paramount’s Big Mistake."
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