Why Tom Cruise joining forces with Warner Bros is a bigger deal than you think

Table Of Content

• June Diane Raphael & Paul Scheer Lead Amazon MGM Pilot ‘DINKs’ From Marta Kauffman
• Tom Cruise Will Launch Into Outer Space To Film A Space Movie Next Year
• Breaking point: why Tom Cruise is living a mission impossible
• What Back to Black's divided critics reveal about movie reviews
• Paula Wagner: Tom Cruise’s Former Producing Partner Explains What A Producer Actually Does
• Mission: Impossible II
• Film

Like Chaplin's original vision, Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope and Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg's Dreamworks SKG (now owned by those baddies at Viacom), Cruise's UA will, apparently, attempt to nurture a creative environment for filmmakers. In an ever-more bottom-line-conscious era of movie-making, it sounds like an impossible mission. "Tom and I are excited to take this classic brand into the future and create a new, artist-centric, artist-friendly company driven by strong business principles," says Wagner, who likened their vision for UA to that of the Medici family's patronage of the arts during Italian Renaissance. In the works since early September, the UA deal has left Wagner and Cruise "completely open right now" to all varieties of film projects, Wagner told TIME, "ranging from high concept to smaller, character-driven films."

June Diane Raphael & Paul Scheer Lead Amazon MGM Pilot ‘DINKs’ From Marta Kauffman

Jack Reacher does everything a movie of its kind is supposed to do, only it does it 10 to 20 percent better than necessary. Cruise will continue to be able to star in films produced elsewhere, just as he did under Paramount. Cruise's production deal with Paramount had given the star as much as $10 million US per year for salaries, expenses and discretionary spending in exchange for first right to finance or distribute the films. Financial terms have not been revealed, but they do not include funding for film production and distribution. This category is for films and television series produced by Cruise/Wagner Productions.

Tom Cruise Will Launch Into Outer Space To Film A Space Movie Next Year

Paula Wagner To Produce 2013 Governors Awards - Oscars.org

Paula Wagner To Produce 2013 Governors Awards.

Posted: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 07:00:00 GMT [source]

In addition to moving the distribution of MGM’s home video business to 20th Century Fox, Mr. Sloan wanted to shore up MGM’s own television channels around the world by cutting deals with various small and independent producers. Mr. Sloan, who once served as chairman of Lion’s Gate Entertainment, also wanted to revive MGM’s movie-making capabilities, but without the expense of layers of creative executives and producers. In November 2006, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer came to Cruise/Wagner with a deal that gave them a percentage of the ownership in United Artists in an effort to revive the floundering production company. In an interview, Mr. Sloan estimated that big studios spent as much as $100 million apiece annually on films that are never released, and he called Hollywood’s film development deals “an enormous welfare project” for writers, agents and producers. For those in the know, they’ll be aware that Cruise has done a lot of these films through his own production company Cruise/Wagner Productions, started in 1993.

Breaking point: why Tom Cruise is living a mission impossible

Shapiro, a former ESPN entertainment executive, will oversee the Cruise/Wagner deal. The dispute became public last week when Sumner Redstone, chairman of Paramount parent Viacom Inc.,criticized Cruise's public behaviour.

What Back to Black's divided critics reveal about movie reviews

The film is one of the great missteps in Cruise’s career and had a notoriously troubled production, though amid that chaos Cruise and McQuarrie seem to have found in one another kindred collaborative spirits. Wagner, as a result, knows how to co-ordinate the full gamut of film projects from big budget to smaller character-focused productions. In the following video by CookeOpticsTV below, she explains what the role of the film producer is. In October 1992, Cruise/Wagner Productions signed an exclusive three-year multi-picture financing and distribution deal with Paramount Pictures. But by helping to revive UA as an artist-led studio, Cruise will be the latest entrant in an old-school Hollywood tradition.

Paula Wagner: Tom Cruise’s Former Producing Partner Explains What A Producer Actually Does

The private equity firms had initially backed the Sony Corporation’s $5 billion takeover of MGM from the investor Kirk Kerkorian in 2004, with the strategy that MGM would be largely shuttered and its 4,000-film library fed through the distribution pipeline of Sony Pictures. “Any producer who makes more than one or two films in their lifetime — with the exception perhaps of Tom Cruise — has a ‘mixed’ thing,” Ms. Wagner says when asked if that was a fair assessment of her partnership with Mr. Cruise. What’s more, Cruise/Wagner’s track record was strong with films starring Mr. Cruise, but those that did not feature the actor — pictures like “The Others,” “Elizabethtown,” “Shattered Glass” and “Narc” — had “mixed” commercial success, according to an executive with knowledge of the discussions.

Mission: Impossible II

In 1994, director Neil Jordan and screenwriter Anne Rice gave fans of Interview With the Vampire an adaptation to sink their teeth into. Based on Rice's 1976 novel of the same name, the drama-horror was headlined by a star-studded cast that included Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Christian Slater. It also featured early performances by actors who would go on to achieve major success, such as Thandie Newton and Kirsten Dunst. In anticipation of the movie's 25th anniversary, The Hollywood Reporter checks in with the actors who starred in 'Interview With the Vampire,' including Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Kirsten Dunst. But the answer to questions about his commitment may lie in another meeting he and Ms. Wagner held in Mr. Sloan’s office just a few days before the deal was announced last November. Knowing that Mr. Cruise and Ms. Wagner would need to exit the Paramount lot in a hurry, Mr. Sloan offered them office space on the 11th floor of the MGM tower.

Film

The deal announced Monday between Cruise/Wagner productions and First & Goal LLC — headed by Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder — will cover overhead and development, allowing Cruise and producing partner Paula Wagner to run their company and make deals to produce films. ONE of the lingering questions about UA is how well Ms. Wagner will fare in putting out four to six films a year, when she and Mr. Cruise previously averaged just one movie a year as producers aligned with Paramount. It is also unclear how Mr. Cruise will manage his loyalties and time among the many professional roles he juggles both inside and outside of UA. Last month, for instance, the Hollywood trades reported that he plans to make a comedy with Ben Stiller as the co-star at 20th Century Fox. FOR Harry Sloan, meanwhile, the raging headlines about Mr. Cruise gave him a flash of inspiration. After taking charge of MGM in 2005 at the behest of its main investors, Providence Equity Partners and the Texas Pacific Group, Mr. Sloan set out to revive the company, which also counts Sony and Comcast as investors.

‘Severance’ Actor Tramell Tillman Joins Next ‘Mission: Impossible’ (Exclusive)

A promotional reel that Mr. Sloan shows investors in MGM’s penthouse screening room makes plain that many of the best-known titles in the current MGM film library — from “The Apartment” to “West Side Story” — were United Artists releases. Regardless, the media firestorm and scrutiny of Mr. Cruise’s career and conduct only intensified when, two months later, Mr. Cruise and Ms. Wagner landed at United Artists, which through different owners has hewed in varying degrees to its founding ideals of artistic hegemony. Whatever Cruise’s physique prevents him from bringing to the role of Jack Reacher — though his performance is as locked in as ever, all simmering rage and gritted jaws and rarely ever smiling — McQuarrie’s script and directing make up for in spades. Jack Reacher is a down-the-middle adult thriller directed with a Hitchcockian eye, meticulously composed and paced with an attention to detail rare in this sort of film. Like all great mysteries, every answer to the questions the audience will spend the film asking is present in the opening set piece. The actor-studio deal could also have wider ramifications around industry rumours that Warner Bros. and Paramount are considering a merger.

But now, along with "substantial ownership," Cruise and Wagner will set United Artists' production slate and Wagner will serve as CEO. Cruise will star in and produce films for the revamped company, which plans to deliver about four movies a year to start. The company signed an exclusive three-year multi-picture financing and distribution deal with Paramount Pictures in Octoer 1992, and would renew and expand that deal several times over the next 14 years. Within a week, Daniel Synder, owner of Washington's NFL team (then known as the Washington Redskins) and two hedge funds, secured financial backing to buy C/W Productions.

For Cruise, his star power — which had fallen substantially in the years following his couch-jumping, histrionic 2005 (an all-time bad PR year for any celebrity) — no longer guaranteed a movie would be a hit. Cruise rethought his approach to blockbuster filmmaking accordingly for Jack Reacher. No longer able to approach every project with a blank check, he agreed to a scaled-down production budget of $60 million. The lower budget made the project an enticing get for a studio — a Cruise movie still had the potential to be a massive hit and this one came with substantially lower risk. It also allowed Cruise some more freedom in his producer responsibilities, such as putting the film’s creative team together. He used that leverage to break McQuarrie out of director jail and put him behind the camera once again.

Mr. Sloan calls his venture with Mr. Cruise an “interesting experiment” that he might extend to other dormant MGM brands like Orion Pictures. He also says that other artists could unite with Mr. Cruise and Ms. Wagner as equity owners of UA. Mr. Sloan considered selling the UA brand name because it was doing nothing more for MGM than gathering dust in a closet.