Was Cruise's Par Departure Inevitable After Dreamworks Buyout?
Filed under: Celebrities and Controversy, Box Office, Tom Cruise, Politics
The Boston Herald has an interesting piece up speculating on whether Paramount execs had planned to end their spendy relationship with Cruise and his production partner, Paula Wagner, to make room for Steven Spielberg since Paramount's acquisition of Dreamworks SKG nine months ago. Brett Arends, writing for the Herald, points out that in a conversation with Par stockholders and Wall Street analysts last December, Viacom chair Sumner Redstone and other execs noted that the acquisition of Dreamworks meant that Dreamworks (and, presumably Spielberg) would be taking over 4-6 slots out of the 14-16 films Paramount puts out per year. Tom Feston, chief operating officer at the time, had emphasized that Dreamworks would be taking slots in Par's existing slate -- which, as Arends notes in his piece via a quote from a Wall Street analyst, indicated that Paramount had already decided then that they would have to get rid of some production relationships to make room.
It's an interesting take on the much ballyhooed C/W-Paramount split, especially in light of Spielberg saying that he was "shocked" to learn of Cruise's departure. Given that Cruise reportedly will make more off of Mission: Impossible: 3 than the prodco, though, one has wonder if the split was inevitable anyhow, regardless of Redstone's talk about Cruise's off-screen antics being to blame, and if the Dreamworks buy just accelerated the process. It will be interesting to see what Cruise and Wagner do on their own, and who ends up winning the long-term box office battle. ...
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
8-29-2006 @ 12:30PM
David said...
Seriously, I hate Tom Cruise.
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8-29-2006 @ 2:32PM
Rashad said...
Shut up, I'm tired of hearing people talk about how much they hate Tom Cruise, if you hate him so much don't even comment on stories involving him.
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9-03-2006 @ 3:12AM
dragonfly said...
Do you know there are people who are actually PAID to bash Tom Cruise and Scientology on these boards?
They're as bad as anti-semites. (Coming from a Jewish-Scientologist here). They think Scientologists are trash and that they can just wipe their feet all over us. They call us "clams" and refer to us as animals and not human beings.
Anti-Scientologists do this to people who are doing things like this:
http://www.scientology.org/en_US/news-media/briefing/2006/drugs/060823.html
Or this:
http://www.scientology.org/en_US/news-media/briefing/2005/vm/tsunamiupdate/050107.html
Or this:
http://www.able.org/
Or this:
http://www.youthforhumanrights.org/watchads/index.html
Someday you may be on the other end of that criticism - ostracized and denied basic rights because of your beliefs. Think about that next time you want to criticize us, people of good will, people just like you.
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