Friday Fluff - Tom Cruise's Little Protest

You may have heard that Tom Cruise has a new movie out: "MI3". If you don't know the title just from the acronym then you're starting to fall way outside the movies target audience.

While Tom may be a petite little guy he's stretched every conceivable marketing possibility to try and insure the movie is a blockbuster. If there are people who work in marketing or PR jobs in the theater audience when you see the film you will literally be able to hear them squeal in delight.

Every conceivable channel had some sort of "the making of..." special the week before the film opened. Even the Food Network cable channel had a special on the catering company who worked on the film in location in Shanghai, China.

The hype before the movie fed right into the marketing chess pieces in the film. Need a younger stud to buck up Tom who's getting a little old for the younger female fans, bring in Johnathan Rhys Meyers in a supporting role. African-American audience; got that covered with Ving Rhames and Laurence Fishburne. And what about the huge Asian market distribution of the film; sign on Maqqie Q as a vixen special agent and make downtown Shanghai one of your locations. Gravitas, gravitas, we need some real acting; stroke-of-genius, bring in Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the evil mastermind.

Of course all of this would have worked flawlessly if a few months before the film Tom wasn't let off the leash to go out in the real world for a little while. His meltdown, or "overly enthusiastic" appearance on Oprah is now legendary. One would have thought it nearly impossible to topple Howard Dean's "Yee-Haw" but Cruise put him to shame. Follow that episode up with a Brooke Shields medication cat-fight, and a lot of children-of-the-corn weirdness on how to delivery the proper Scientology baby and its no wonder that all those good marketing vibes got shot to hell by the time the film opened.

It may not be just fans or potential fans that have begun looking at the star with a more critical eye. George Lucas weighed in on the MI3 movie:

"I think Tom Cruise proved that people are getting bored with that kind of stuff."

But in the end; or at least returning back to the beginning point of this post, for me there was only one part of the movie that clanked like a shiny new Diet Pepsi can on a worn cobblestone alley in Shanghai (Note: no important plot details revealed here). Cruise is getting a lecture towards the end of the film from one of the bad guys. You know, the part in almost every action film where the evil plan is revealed to the hero just before the climatic final scene. The bad guy talks about what disasters their plan will let loose and then mentions at the end of his little speech, that after the Armageddon event, the "United States can then come in and do what it does best, clean up the mess and rebuild" [it may not be exactly the words said but this is pretty darn close].

My friend and I sat there in the theater and looked at each other - Did he? No, he didn't. Oh, yes he did!!! Did Tom just gave George W. a little poke in the eye about Iraq? Maybe it was intentional, maybe not. Did the writers slip it in? Did Tom green-light the dialog? Who knows, but given the fact that Tom's approval ratings are sliding off the same cliff as George W. he might want to put on his marketing thinking cap and rebrand the movie a little bit. Add more of that protest film bravura, or bring back the wheelchair from his movie Born on the Fourth of July.

For the moment though, lets definitely put the plans for MI4 on hold.