Cruise Gets Bruised

Poor Tom Cruise.  His movie made only a paltry $48 million at the box office this weekend.

That might sound like a lot, but for a film that cost more than three times that much to make, and which had been predicted to earn much more, everybody's favorite vitamin-taking cult member might want to threaten to eat a few less placentas.  ("Placentii"?)

NBC's "Dateline" show decided to take a far less ass-sucking route than Diane Sawyer on the publicity parade, opting for plenty of Scientology hijinks rather than Cruise's boyhood sob story.

You know when bloggers like Jessica Coen and Perez are featured in the piece that the claws are bound to come out.

By the way, who's the guy next to Cruise in the picture, anyway?  Is it, you know — "him"?

[Watch video – 11:30, WMV format, high bandwidth]

[Watch video – 11:30, WMV format, low bandwidth]

Comments

[Queer Conservative]

Who's him? WHO'S HIM!?

[Craig Ranapia]

Oh, so fucking what... 95% of the human race does not live in the United States. The last film I rushed off to see on opening weekend - twice - was 'Master and Commander' . More and more often, I'm quite happy to wait until films come out on DVD - which are an increasingly large proportion of stuido revenue, which suggests I'm far from the only person who can't be bothered with the crappy theatrical experience.

2) Has anyone noticed that cinema grosses

[Latin Declinator]

Plural Nominativ of Placenta: placentae,
but in this case it asks the Accusativ: placentas.
Instinctively right.

[beautifulatrocities]

When this bitch cracks, it'll make Mariah Carey's trainwreck look cute

[Aatom]

WHEN he cracks? look at his face in this picture. he is not a sane man.

[Dan]

Not sure where you're going with the 95% comment, Craig, seeing as how MI3 did one of those simulatneous worldwide release thingies.

The distributors really went all out with the promotion on this one, probably to offset the shitty publicity their lead actor brought into the mix. Combine this with the great reviews MI3's been getting and the weird rumors that scientologists are buying huge chunks of tickets directly from the BO, and this definitely doesn't bode well for the remainder of tommy's career.

I give him a year before I see him in some kind of weird scientology informercial channeling miss cleo.

[e.c. larson]

i liked the quotes i've seen from paramount execs insisting that tom's pr problems had NO bearing on the box office numbers. um, first you don't know that's true, and if it wasn't tom, then i guess it must have been the studios fault. it's amazing how far up tom's ass everyone is willing to go that they would would make themselves look bad in order to shield him from the blame.

[North Dallas Thirty]

Like I said... karma's a bitch.

[Attmay]

Are these the same Paramount execs who insisted Forrest Gump lost money?

[Craig Ranapia]

Dan:

Where I'm going is that I can't really understand why anyone gives a snot about opening weekend grosses - theatre receipts are a (declining) minority of studio incomes, and any number of movies (The Matrix comes to mind) grew their gross despite underwhelming opening weekends. Sorry to say, but I don't think Paramount or Cruise are going to lose a dime on this puppy. The world is full of people who don't give the proverbial flying fuck at a donut who Diane Sawyer is, or how weird Tomkat is as long as the film is kinda cool...