George Clooney Steals Action Thriller From Tom Cruise

Clooney, Not Cruise, for Action Thriller

Fox News/June 16, 2006
By Roger Friedman

The word around Hollywood about Tom Cruise? It’s not so good, thanks to the relative disasters surrounding “Mission: Impossible 3.”

The third part of the “Mission” trilogy is now all about stalled with a domestic box office take of $128 million. Its total budget, I am told, was well over $200 million.

Even though Cruise was just named the No. 1 celebrity on Forbes magazine's Top 100 list for the past year, his star has nevertheless fallen and his career has taken a beating.

Sources say that a hot studio property, an action thriller that Cruise desperately wanted to make in the coming year, has been taken away from him. For the first time ever, in fact, Cruise has not gotten first dibs on a Hollywood project. Instead, the movie will probably be offered to George Clooney if it hasn’t been already.

“There isn’t a major studio that will offer Tom Cruise a $200 million movie now,” one source told me. “There’s going to be a big reconsideration now of what he should do next.”

Many in the business feel that Cruise should just take a year off. But that seems unlikely when you factor in his Type A personality and need to be seen as often as possible.

Cited as a major factor in his career trouble: Cruise’s insistence on making an issue of his involvement in Scientology.

“People who knew him just a few years ago had no stories about Cruise pressuring them to be part of it,” says a source.

Indeed, many people I’ve spoken with who worked on Cruise’s movies from the recent past swore to me that Scientology didn’t come up for discussion. But all of that has changed in the last couple of years, and now Cruise’s carefully honed image is in jeopardy of being destroyed.

What happened? “Obviously they [Scientology] told him it was time to pay up one way or another,” says an old Cruise associate. “They definitely forced him to go public.”