Knight and Day

The second weekend of Toy Story tops again. Between that and Twilight: Eclipse this week and then the next Harry Potter, people will for get very quickly.

Has Tom Cruise done anything noteworthy in the past 5 years? Valkyrie was OK (never saw it, just going on reviiews), but aside from that? ANything?

 

He was tremendous in Tropic Thunder and Lions for Lambs was also very good.

As far as better resumes over the last 30 years. I'll grant you Hanks. There's no way Nicholson has even come close to matching Cruise's box office during that time. If you take away the Toy Story movies, I'd bet Cruise and Hanks are pretty close.

 

A friend of mine, who considers himself a Cruise fan, said Knight and Day is by far Cruise's worst movie ever.

 

That makes me want to see it just so I can ponder the demise of his career for 2 hours.

Cruise's best movie was probably Rain Main. His best performance might have been in Samuri where he didn't have anyone like Hoffman sharing the load.

 

What I find most impressive about his career is that while some films were better than others, he's yet to really make a movie that was just a piece of garbage, hated by critics and the audience.

This might be the first one.

 

Far and Away was a giant serving of swill, of epic proportions.

Give me more time. I can pile on, still more, if asked.

 

Knight And Day sits in 3rd place with a slightly better-than-expected $20.5M for the 3-day weekend and $27.7M for its 5-day cume from 3,098 theaters. So no one inside Building 88 will be horribly embarrassed, which is all the Fox studio execs ensconced there care about. Especially after the pic received a failing grade of only $3.8M when it opened Wednesday in 3,043 venues. Yet this is the kind of $117M rom-com ($107M with the Massachusetts tax breaks, split among New Regency, Fox, and Dune) that should have grossed an easy $35+M right out of the gate. "It's an original movie aimed at adults that is really good," a Fox exec insisted to me. "It takes longer to catch on with audiences."

Then again, I have rarely seen Hollywood so transfixed on a movie before it opened. But with starry casting, and promotion aplenty, everything about this pic was high-profile -- so a spotlight comes with the territory. (Those stunts for junketing journalists in Spain cost a fortune but translated into media value.) Plus, Fox is the studio Hollywood loves to hate, even more so after the insane success of Avatar, because it regularly takes medium-budget mediocre movies and makes big hits out of them because of killer marketing. Knight And Day should have been no exception. But the media keep gunning for Tom Cruise post-Oprah's couch and wishing him to fail. Cameron Diaz becomes guilty by association because she can't open a movie. And the weeks of poor tracking on this pic so unnerved the studio that it made a big PR deal of sneaking the film last weekend to counter the bad buzz building up.

The truth is that the film does play. Although once classy James Mangold should find different representation for letting him direct this long-in-development-hell Joe Roth produced drek. The script passed through the hands of 9 writers as well as Mangold who did an uncredited polish. (At one point titled just Wichita, it was Fox film boss Tom Rothman who came up with the treacly Knight And Day.) For that matter, I don't understand why Cruise did the movie either, especially when he had so many better options back in February 2009. Like The Tourist, starring Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie. Back then it would have paired Tom Cruise with Charlize Theron and put him again with Valkyrie scribe Chris McQuarrie. But I digress.

I'm told test screenings were troubled, with audiences cruelly complaining that Tom Cruise is "weird" and Cameron Diaz is "old". And yet Tom Rothman and Emma Watts were buoyed that they got the pair for bargain basement prices, especially since Tom is still a huge star internationally. Knight And Day opened this weekend in 12 mostly small overseas markets - 8 in Asia/Pacific, 2 in Latin America and 2 in Europe. The film earned $12.6M on 2,238 screens and opened #1 in Russia, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Hong Kong. But most openings are in the middle of July after the World Cup.

The public may pile on Cruise for the movie's domestic underplay, but Hollywood thinks responsibility lies with Tony Sella's and Pam Levine's marketing suckfest. The one-sheet graphic didn't even show the stars' faces, the trailers "made the movie look a USA Network TV show", to quote one rival maven, and the lame line that it's "Tom Cruise at his Jerry Maguire best" compares apples to oranges. On the other hand, I hear Rothman micromanaged the movie down to approving publicity stills and picking the release date, while Cruise pushed to have the pic sold as Mission Impossible 4. I can't wait for The Blame Game to be played on Monday morning because there's plenty to go around!
http://www.deadline.com/2010/06/first-box-office-1-toy-story-19m-friday60m-2-grown-ups-14m40m-knight-and-day-7m20m/#more-49710

 

I'm watching it right now. Based on the first 15 minutes, Cruise is doing an effective job being smug and what I'm sure he thinks is funny, but not.

Diaz is dreadful.

 

My predicition: Fox will sell this as 'Mission Impossible 4' overseas after the World Cup in July and make many hundreds of millions of dollars. Knight and Day 2 anyone?? Stallone & Arnie used to do this all the time back in the 1980's with no plot visual action flicks-- it will take a while for Tom Cruise's domestic box office troubles to echo around the globe.

 

I forgot about Far and Away. Awful movie.

 

Obviously the audience hates this one, but I thought a lot of the critics were raving.

 

Tom Cruise's dream of a glorious career comeback turned into a Pixar-driven nightmare this weekend when 'Toy Story 3' and even Adam Sandler's 'Grown Ups' (!) walloped Tom's new film, 'Knight and Day,' at the box office, leaving the once golden superstar to ask himself: what next?

"This was the worst opening for a Cruise action movie in 20 years," one industry insider tells me. "I just don't see how even the eerily eternally optimistic Tom can see this as anything but very bad news, maybe even the end of Tom's long career."



Cruise, who has always been a much bigger star than box office draw, has had a bunch a recent box office flops, including 'Lion For Lambs' and 'Valkyrie,' yet this latest film was meant to be his big comeback, marketed as 'Mission Impossible 4.' So what went wrong?

"People have turned on the once beloved actor and don't want to spend two hours with him anymore," one producer tells me. "I have never in my years in the business seen such venom for an actor. Tom has become the poster child of everything creepy. After this weekend he must be worried that his career is over."

It was over five years ago that Tom adopted the role of unofficial spokesman for the Church of Scientology. Then he jumped on Oprah's couch, chided Brooke Shields for taking medicine for postpartum depression and got snappish with 'Today' host Matt Lauer. Let's face it, he has never been able to recover from all this.

"Now, the man who used to be the biggest movie star in the world is reduced to putting on a fat suit, fake chest hair, a bald cap and slapping J.Lo's butt at the MTV Movie Awards," a friend of the actor tells me. "Who would have thought that cute kid that we all fell in love with in 'Top Gun' might see his last big role playing the fat, bald, vulgar movie producer Les Grossman?" http://www.popeater.com/2010/06/28/tom-cruise-knight-and-day-box-office/