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The recent news that The Dark Knight Rises prologue will screen before Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol easily boosts MI4′s potential box office. It also presents one of film history’s most intriguing ironies. This one involving Mission Impossible‘s leading man Tom Cruise.
No, Tom Cruise BTC. “Before the couch…”
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Flashback to the year 2007 when it was none other than Tom Cruise who was considered the biggest movie star in the world. A career long fueled on huge box office hits (Top Gun, A Few Good Men, War of the Worlds), Mr. Cruise was not too far out from his latest box office winner in Mission Impossible 3 (Summer 2006). No one imagined his reign as Hollywood’s top A-lister would end anytime soon.
In November of that year Mr. Cruise starred in a film called Lions For Lambs. Not shy about starring in smaller films (Magnolia), this one didn’t seem unfriendly at first. Mr. Cruise also had a personal financial stake invested as he and production partner Paula Wagner had helped form the current studio version of United Artists which released the film.
Lions for Lambs was a colossal flop at the box office. Affecting both Mr. Cruise’s financial and box office status. Suddenly it was the unthinkable. Could another A-lister challenge for Tom Cruise’s top spot? Surely not off just one flop? A number of factors would have to happen even for this to remotely take place. Those factors being as follows: first, whoever challenged for Mr. Cruise’s mantle would have to be currently blockbuster successful, secondly, would need to open a film quick enough to take advantage and third, that film would have to be an enormous box office hit. Enter this man…
Seizing on the opportunity, actor Will Smith opened as the lead in I Am Legend that very next month. No stranger to box office hits himself (Independence Day, Men In Black, Bad Boys, Hitch), I Am Legend was given an incredible opening boost by having a certain prologue shown before it. That prologue was from…
None other than The Dark Knight. I Am Legend went on to post an higher than expected 77 million dollar opening weekend. Even more impressive was the film’s final worldwide gross of 585 million. Off these results the mantle of biggest movie star in the world quickly passed to Mr. Smith who hasn’t looked back since.
Mr. Cruise on the other hand has seen his film career change dramatically and is presently nowhere near the box office force he once was. Even last summer’s Knight And Day greatly underwhelmed at the box office.
“We’re still friends…right…?”
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So now back to present day and the delicious irony of the prologue for Dark Knight’s sequel this time being shown before a Tom Cruise film. Will it be enough to boost MI4′s opening weekend to help him reclaim his mantle from Will Smith? Don’t bet on it. Mr. Smith isn’t looking to have a flop anytime in the near future to present that opportunity.
Still, MI4′s numbers are going to be much larger – easily beating all box office opening weekend estimates currently attached to it (some as low as 30 million). Whether it can help repair Mr. Cruise’s film career is another matter.
“Maybe if I look like Batman, it’ll help…”
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Batman. Tom Cruise. Will Smith vs. Vampires. All leading to the biggest movie star in the world. Incredible.
All my best,
Sensei White Lotus
Follow @MCAssassins
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Photo Credits:
All Dark Knight Rises images: © 2011 – Warner Bros. Entertainment.
All Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol images: © 2011 – Paramount Pictures.
All Dark Knight images: © TM &DC Comics.2008 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Lions For Lambs image: © 2007 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved.
I Am Legend image: © 2007 Warner Bros. Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
Knight and Day image: © 2010 Twentieth Century Fox and Regency Enterprises. All rights reserved.
Independence Day image: © 20th Century Fox – All Rights Reserved.
You forgot to mention I am legend was terrible.
I liked “I am Legend” and gauging by the box office income it generated so did a lot of other people. It gets bonus points for NOT being a political piles of [explicative deleted]ing [explicative deleted]. Additionally it has the rare set-up of having a military character… THAT ISN’T EVIL – holy [explicative deleted]! I don’t think oil was even mentioned once in the movie!
Now if in clarification you meant that it was terrible because it completely deviated from the book and what was going on in there than I can see your point. I still don’t think that makes it a terrible move though, just a terrible adaptation if you went to see it expecting it to be anything like the book.
I thought the irony was that Tom Cruise is like the Dark Knight in that he took on all the heat for speaking up about the truth of pharmaceuticals and was banished by the mass of idiots in this country because he did the right thing: by being passionate about a subject that everyone is afraid to confront.
This is a good essay, actually. And the copy editing is even done well. However, that’s not what the word irony means. It’s still just a coincidence. Irony is when the *opposite* of the expected outcome occurs. There is no reason for an individual to except that, just because The Dark Knight had a trailer on a Will Smith movie that it somehow would never have a trailer on a Tom Cruise movie. In fact, it’s not even a coincidence. Both are adult leaning action movies released in December.
All the same, more like this one. This is your best one ever.
Thanks…. Appreciate your time in reading it…
I love it. Linking Cruise to Batman to Vampires. Not easily done.
…All we need to add now is Kevin Bacon. Thanks for visiting.