Do Moviegoers Care if Tom Cruise is Crazy?

Roger Friedman wonders if the beginning of the end isn’t near for Tom Cruise.

Tom Cruise has a big problem. You might say, yeah, Iâ€™d like some of those problems: Heâ€™s considered the top movie star in the world (by someone, not sure who, but OK, itâ€™s the conventional wisdom); heâ€™s got millions and millions of dollars; he was married to Nicole Kidman; heâ€™s having a baby with the girl from “Dawsonâ€™s Creek.” Sounds good to the Average Joe.

Sounds pretty good to me! Although my wife would get pretty pissed if Katie Holmes were having my baby. Still, I’d take the millions. How about one? But I digress. Back to Cruise’s “problem.”

In the last few days, Cruise has hit a major speed bump in the “M: I3″ campaign. Whether itâ€™s true or not, the public now believes that he somehow convinced Comedy Central to pull an episode of “South Park” that mocked him and Scientology.

This comes on the heels of another and similar case of Cruise censorship that swept through the press: that Cruise got the producers of the film “Thank You for Smoking” to clip out Holmesâ€™ sex scene montage before the movie was shown at Sundance. Whether itâ€™s true or not, Holmes has been completely absent from the “Smoking” publicity, avoiding all the premieres and press junkets.

Add all of this to the last year of Cruise-iana: his jumping around on Oprahâ€™s couch, the fight with Matt Lauer over the history of psychiatry, the fact that Holmes â€” in signing with Cruise “personal” notes to new Scientology inductees â€” appears to have been in some way co-opted by Cruise.

The stories are pervasive, and not just in the supermarket tabloids. Michael Jackson can tell you that when youâ€™re a punch line on a sitcom, the party is over.

Last fall, on one of those ABC comedies, one of the characters zinged by another by referring to Cruise as “scary.” OK, thatâ€™s scary, if youâ€™re about to release a $200 million movie.

Aside from the two previous “Mission: Impossible” movies and “War of the Worlds,” Cruise has not been much of a box-office blockbuster. “War,” to set it aside, had the added advantage of being a Steven Spielberg movie with incredible special effects. It took in around $230 million, the same as the “Mission: Impossible” movies.

But regular Cruise dramas have had middling results. “Collateral,” “The Last Samurai” and “Vanilla Sky” were each $100 million movies. Of course, you have to remember that Cruise likely got $20 million off the gross on those. That doesnâ€™t leave much of a profit margin.

So “M: I3″ suddenly takes on a new importance. Sometime in the next nine days, a PR machine is going to have to rev up. Cruise will be forced to come into full view and submit himself to a lot of questions posed by strangers. You may recall that last year, one of those strangers, quite rudely, squirted him in the face with a water pistol. Cruise responded angrily.

Fair questions. The thing is, “Vanilla Sky” was an awful movie. Even some sex scenes with PenÃ©lope Cruz and Cameron Diaz couldn’t save it. “Collateral” was actually pretty good but didn’t get much buzz. Conversely, I thought the “Mission Impossible” movies both sucked but they did well.

The Scientology thing and the ranting and raving are distracting, to be sure, but Cruise is actually a pretty good actor. And plenty of actors are nutty.

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Do Moviegoers Care if Tom Cruise is Crazy?

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