11 January 2007

What's wrong with this picture?

'In August, when Tom Cruise’s production deal with Paramount Pictures, Viacom’s film division, ended, Sumner Redstone, the chairman of Viacom, mentioned Cruise’s controversial public behavior, which, he said, hurt the box-office for Paramount’s summer release of the third “Mission: Impossible” movie. What Redstone didn’t say, as Edward Jay Epstein reported in the Financial Times, was that Cruise had a deal with Paramount which gave him an enormous share of the DVD revenue on the movie. “M:i:III” cost a hundred and fifty million dollars to make, and its worldwide theatrical gross was almost four hundred million. But Paramount realized that after the theatres took their cut, and the production, promotion, and overhead costs were deducted from what was left, it wasn’t going to make much money—maybe none—while Cruise would walk away with seventy million dollars'

- David Denby, 'Big Pictures', The New Yorker, 8 January 2007

[...and as has already been pointed out, MI-3 and Cruise weren't particularly good to begin with...]

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