Dec 5, 2011

Tom Cruise Visits India’s Taj Mahal

The “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” star is preparing for the world premiere of his film on Wednesday.

NEW DELHI â€” Hollywood star Tom Cruise says his visit to India this week follows a lifelong desire to see the country.

He said while touring the iconic, white-marble Taj Mahal mausoleum in Agra that he is “very excited” about being in the country for a fan screening of his latest action-thriller, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, days ahead of its world premiere on Wednesday.

Cruise joins Bollywood star Anil Kapoor for the red-carpet screening Sunday in Mumbai. The film sees Cruise reprise his role as secret agent Ethan Hunt, while Kapoor plays an Indian business tycoon.

Cruise told Press Trust of India on Saturday, “I wanted to come to India my whole life, so I am very excited.”

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Dec 5, 2011

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Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

Tom Cruise Dazzles India: If Offered A Bollywood Film ‘I Would Never Say No’

The actor also posed with the stars of upcoming Bollywood release “Players,” an adaptation of “The Italian Job.”

MUMBAI â€“ Tom Cruise rounded off his two-day India visit Sunday night with a red carpet screening of Mission: Impossible â€“ Ghost Protocol, held at an IMAX cinema in Mumbai.

Arriving in a motorcade of BMWs branded with the Ghost Protocol logo, Cruise â€“ clad in a blue shirt and jeans — was greeted by screaming fans, with whom he spent almost two hours in between talking to the media.

â€œI love watching Hindi movies. There are many Hindi movies that come out every year but I do watch a few of them. (If offered a Bollywood film) I would never say no. I would love to do it,â€ the 49-year-old actor told reporters.

Ghost Protocol will release in India on Dec. 16 â€“ including dubbed versions in Hindi and regional languages — distributed by Viacom18 Motion Pictures. Viacom18 is also promoting its upcoming Bollywood title Players, an adaptation of The Italian Job, directed by the brothers Abbas-Mastan and starring actors Abhishek Bachchan and Neil Nitin Mukesh and actresses Sonam Kapoor and Bipasha Basu.

Cruise posed with the Players cast on the red carpet for a Hollywood-meets-Bollywood moment drowned in a blaze of frenzied media flashbulbs.

Ghost Protocol also features a brief cameo by top Bollywood actor Anil Kapoor, who accompanied Cruise throughout his India tour, including Saturday’s fleeting visit to the Taj Mahal.

Kapoor hosted an exclusive party Saturday night at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai, where the handpicked 150-odd invitees included Bollywood celebrities such as superstar actor Aamir Khan, actresses Preity Zinta and Sonam Kapoor (Anil’s daughter), directors Shekhar Kapur, Farhan Akhtar and Vidhu Vinod Chopra and Oscar-winning sound designer Resul Pookutty (Slumdog Millionaire).

â€œWhat a gracious host Anil is & OMG! Tom used to be my heart throb in Top Gun!â€ tweeted Zinta. â€œTom Cruise asked me why I was not making Mr India 2? A set up by Anil Kapoor I am sure,â€ tweeted Kapur.

Anil Kapoor’s upcoming projects include an Indian version of the hit Fox TV show 24 (in which he starred during its final season). When asked if Kapoor picked up any tips from Cruise’s Ethan Hunt for his turn as the Indian Jack Bauer, the 51-year-old actor said, â€œOf course, being in Ghost Protocol was an experience in itself and I am sure there is something I can learn from Ethan Hunt.â€

The Ghost Protocol screening was also graced by the film’s director Brad Bird and actress Paula Patton, who greeted everyone with the traditional Indian â€œnamaste.”

â€œI have some idea of Bollywood films thanks to Anil Kapoor and I would love to work with (superstar actress and former Miss World) Aishwarya Rai,â€ Patton said.

Cruise was also entertained by a brief dance performance by top Bollywood choreographer Shiamak Davar’s troupe just before Ghost Protocol screened for the 1,500 guests and fans.

Ghost Protocol will see its world premiere Wednesday at the Dubai Film Festival, for which Cruise left Mumbai Sunday night.

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Dec 1, 2011

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Edge of Tomorrow

Cruise cues ‘All You Need Is Kill’

After sitting in development limbo for many months, “All You Need Is Kill” may finally be on the fast track as Tom Cruise has agreed to star.

Based on the graphic novel, the original story is in the vein of “Groundhog Day,” with a twist: A soldier in a war against aliens finds himself reliving his last day over and over after being killed. Through the training and battles he experiences in these time loops, he becomes a better soldier.

While a deal with the studio isn’t officially signed, Cruise has been weighing this role for some time after continued talks with director Doug Liman.

Sources say Warners. prexy Jeff Robinov always wanted a big star, though the script called for a younger actor like Ryan Gosling or Joseph Gordon Levitt. Studio has already had the script rewritten to make the character fit Cruise’s age.

Dante Harper penned the script with Joby Harold doing the rewrite. Sources said Cruise liked the script so much that Liman traveled to Pittsburgh, where the thesp was shooting Paramount and Skydance’s “One Shot,” to meet with the actor about the role.

Another important development: Liman, who’s been onboard to direct “Kill” for some time, has lined it up as his next project. For months, Liman had been weighing doing this or the Paramount space adventure “Luna,” which struggled to assemble financing and saw David Ellison’s Skydance Productions drop out — forcing Liman to turn to “Kill” for now.

Cruise’ busy schedule could enable Liman to do both: After “One Shot,” Cruise is expected to shoot the Universal sci-fier “Oblivion” in March, then start on “Kill” in the late third/early fourth quarter of 2012. No start date is yet set.

Cruise, repped by CAA, can be seen next in Par and Skydance’s “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol,” which bows Dec. 16, followed by New Line’s “Rock of Ages” next summer.

Erwin Stoff, Tom Lassally and Jason Hoffs are producing through 3 Arts Entertainment.

Harold is an exec producer on the project.

Source: Variety

Nov 25, 2011

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Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol Set for Early Imax Release in U.K.

Paramount Pictures and Imax to preview movie in large format before wide release.

LONDON â€“ U.K. previews of Tom Cruise starrer Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol will be on Imax screens almost a week ahead of its wide rollout across British screens.

Imax and Paramount Pictures said the plan would be the first time a U.K. movie has been released early in Imax theaters.

The aim from both is to reinforce the â€œevent natureâ€ of the movie, some of which director Brad Bird shot scenes for using Imax cameras.

One of them sees Cruise scaling part of the worldâ€™s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa Tower in Dubai, before performing a dizzying stunt by running down part of it attached to a fire hose.

Birdâ€™s movie sees Cruise star alongside Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg and Paula Patton.

The picture will play big in Imax in the U.K. from Dec. 21 this year before going wide from Dec. 26 everywhere.

Imax also announced it is teaming with U.K. exhibition giant Cineworld Group for a revenue sharing agreement to install three new digital IMAXÂ® theater systems in England and Scotland.

The systems will be installed in existing multiplexes in Edinburgh, Sheffield and Nottingham.

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Nov 14, 2011

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Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol TV Spot

First TV Spot is out

Nov 12, 2011

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Knight and Day, Vanilla Sky

Gallery Updates: Knight & Day and Vanilla Sky

Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, double dose of screen captures! Plus HQ Stills for Knight & Day.

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Knight & Day > Movie Stills

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Nov 9, 2011

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Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

Mission: Impossible: Brad Bird goes into Cruise control

Brad Bird, who has two Oscars for his Pixar films, is on a mission to make his first live-action blockbuster but, on a recent morning, as he regaled some journalists with behind-the-scenes tales of Hollywood, there was really only one word to describe his raconteur style: animated.

Waving his arms, hunching over and making high-decibel sound effects, the writer-director was a one-man cartoon as he unspooled a story about working on the â€œRatatouilleâ€ recording sessions with Peter Oâ€™Toole. It was a good story but one suspects Bird will walk away from his new project, â€œMission: Impossible â€“ Ghost Protocol,â€ with far more exotic memories.

The fourth film in the â€œMissionâ€ franchise, with Tom Cruise back as super-spy Ethan Hunt, opens everywhere on Dec. 21 and, five days before that, it will get a special early run at IMAX and select prestige theaters. It was Bird who pushed hard for that early giant-screen plan â€” he is, quite literally, thinking big for this key career moment. But donâ€™t think for a minute that heâ€™s sour on his cartoon past.

â€œIâ€™m not like some animation directors and like, â€˜Thank God Iâ€™m out of animation and sitting at the adultâ€™s table, Iâ€™m tired of sitting at the kidâ€™s table,â€™â€ Bird said with a mock, raspy anger. â€œI have other ideas Iâ€™d love to do in animation. My ideal career from here would be to jump back and forth and let the project dictate what medium I work in. To me itâ€™s all storytelling.â€

The story this time starts in Russia where the Kremlin is bombed and the blame is put on Hunt and his three IMF teammates (portrayed by Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg and Paula Patton), who must embark on a perilous globetrotting mission to get to the true villains. Shooting a Paramount Pictures tentpole in Dubai; Prague, Czech Republic; Moscow; Mumbai, India; and Vancouver, Canada, shows how much ground Bird has covered since his drawing-table days. The 54-year-old Montana native started his career as an animator with early credits like â€œAnimalympicsâ€ in 1980 (produced, by the way, by â€œTronâ€ writer-director Steven Lisberger) and Disneyâ€™s â€œThe Fox and the Houndâ€ a year later.
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Nov 9, 2011

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Rock of Ages

Rock of Ages: Tom Cruise tries something really scary: singing

Tom Cruise risked life and limb filming action sequences at the top of the world’s tallest building for “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol,” but he said that wasn’t any scarier than the singing required for his first musical, the just-wrapped “Rock of Ages.”

“They all have their risks,” Cruise said with a laugh of playing rocker Stacee Jaxx in Adam Shankman’s adaptation of the Tony-winning 2006 musical, which featured songs by jukebox heroes such as Bon Jovi, Styx, Journey and Pat Benatar. Among the tunes Cruise belts out in the film: “Pour Some Sugar on Me.”

Shankman is coming off the foot-tapping success of “Hairspray,” while Cruise, inspired by his dance-loving wife, Katie Holmes, is taking a true genre gamble even as he celebrates the 30th anniversary of his first screen appearances (“Endless Love” and “Taps” both came out in 1981). The action star said Holmes’ influence is also why he added some memorable dance-floor moves to his Hollywood agent performance in “Tropic Thunder.”
“I had started dancing because I was inspired by my wife. She kept saying, ‘You’ve got to do a musical sometime,’ ” Cruise said. “Kate’s a dancer, so she would say, ‘Let’s go to dance class,’ and she would take us and that’s how I kind of came up with the idea of Les Grossman doing hip-hop. And then to take it to this level with this? It was really fun.”

Shankman has said Cruise is a natural and has music in his genes thanks to an opera singer in his family tree. The filmmaker has shown a flair for the unexpected: Shankman pulled a signature performance from John Travolta in his gender-flipped role in “Hairspray.” So perhaps “Rock of Ages” will be one of Cruise’s acclaimed “experiment” roles, such as in “Magnolia,” “Collateral” or the aforementioned “Tropic Thunder” — even if the sight of the bare-chested, long-maned Cruise as Jaxx has already been jeered across the Internet.

The actor said he’s just pumped to be working with Shankman.

“He’s on fire,” Cruise said. “What he accomplished with ‘Hairspray’ was amazing. My daughter has seen it 15 times and our whole family has watched it over and over and it’s just enormously entertaining. To be able to hold that tone throughout is really something.”

The cast of “Rock of Ages” also includes Diego Boneta, Julianne Hough, Russell Brand, Alec Baldwin, Mary J. Blige and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and much of the heavy lifting for the shoot was done in South Florida. Cruise said his singing and dancing work there was a different challenge than his “Mission: Impossible” job swinging out windows atop the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, but in some ways more stressful.

“I was working on it when I was finishing ‘Mission’ and I was singing five hours a day and I was dancing five hours a day,” Cruise said. “Adam said, ‘Look, we’re going to have a lot of fun,’ and we really did…. I did six months preparing for the movie, and all my stunt training and all of those years doing that, it helped me with the choreography.”

“Rock of Ages” hits theaters in June.

Source: LA Times