Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are ending their five-year marriage.
“This is a personal and private matter for Katie and her family,” Holmes’ attorney, Jonathan Wolfe, said in a statement, first given to People Magazine. “Katie’s primary concern remains, as it always has been, her daughter’s best interest.”
Cruise’s rep, Amanda Lunberg, told THR, “Kate has filed for divorce and Tom is deeply saddened and is concentrating on his three children. Please allow them their privacy to work this out.”
The actor and actress were married in a star-studded Italian wedding in November, 2006, and have a six-year-old daughter named Suri. Cruise was previously married to actress Nicole Kidman, from 1990-2001, and actress Mimi Rogers, from 1987-1990. Holmes is 16 years his junior; she was previously engaged to actor Chris Klein.
Holmes is perhaps best known for her lead role in the teen drama Dawson’s Creek, while Cruise has toplined a long list of hit films. His most recent effort, the 80s hair-metal musical Rock of Ages, struggled at the box office, while this winter’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol proved a massive hit. He will next be seen as Jack Reacher in the big screen adaptation of the action novel One Shot.
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Six years of marriage has not diminished the love Tom Cruise feels for his famous wife.
In Playboy’s June issue, the “Mission: Impossible†star says he loves Katie Holmes as much now as he did when they got hitched in 2006 – even though naysayers were placing bets on how long their union would last.
“She is an extraordinary person, and if you spent five minutes with her, you’d see it,†said the 49-year-old actor, who stars in the upcoming film “Rock of Ages.â€
“Everything she does, she does with this beautiful creativity,” he went on. “When she becomes interested in something, she doesn’t talk about it – she does it.”
Case in point: Holmes’ continual willingness to try new things.
“One week I said to her, ‘You’ve been up in the middle of the night. Is everything okay?’†Cruise recalled. “She smiled and then threw this thing on my desk and said, ‘I wrote this script.’ She wanted to try it, and she did. She wanted to try designing clothes, and now her line is wonderful and, to me, an example of how she just creates beautiful things in her life. She has a voice and warmth as an artist, as a mother.”
If you can’t tell, “I’m a romantic,” Cruise said. “I like doing things like creating romantic dinners, and she enjoys that … I’m just happy, and I have been since the moment I met her. What we have is very special.”
Cruise would rather spend time with his 33-year-old wife and their daughter, Suri, than anything else, but that doesn’t mean he slacks on perfecting his craft.
“I needed to find out if I could really sing!” he told W magazine of rehearsals for “Rock of Ages,†in which he plays Stacee Jaxx, an aging, long-haired, tattooed rockstar.
“[Axl] Rose’s former vocal coach [Ron Anderson] came in and worked with me,†he said. “And then I had to learn how to play guitar. I’m very good at air guitar—and air drums—but I had never played an actual guitar.”
After spending weeks honing “Stacee’s technical skills, I was thinking about the character, and I said, “You know what? I need a monkey,†Cruise said, referring to his character’s animal bestie in the musical-turned-movie. “The baboon’s name has to be Hey Man. Stacee Jaxx doesn’t work without Hey Man.”
“Rock of Ages†hits theaters June 15.
Source: CNN
DEADLINE EXCLUSIVE: When Paramount Pictures and Skydance Productions were making the green light decision on the $150 million budget Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol following the lackluster $76 million domestic gross on Knight & Day, some wondered if Tom Cruise was still in the conversation as one of Hollywood’s most bankable male stars. The answer is yes. Today, the film will reach a global gross of $603 million, making Ghost Protocol the highest-grossing film of Cruise’s long career. It surpassed any film that Cruise made during his long relationship with Paramount, beating the $591.7 million gross turned in by War Of The Worlds.
Cruise has starred in five of Paramount’s top 10 grossing films in the last 15 years, with M:I4 falling in behind Titanic‘s $1.8 billion, Indiana Jones And The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull‘s $786.6 million, Forrest Gump‘s $677.4 million, and Iron Man 2‘s $623 million. The film has a strong chance to pass the Iron Man sequel. Studio insiders tell me that the film crosses the $400 million mark internationally today, and has already grossed $36 million in China after being released six days ago. We’ve seen how much Cruise put into the film as an actor — running up and down the Dubai skyscraper was something no star outside of Jackie Chan would do. Beyond, that, he spent 16 days promoting the film, covering nine countries on six continents. Cruise, who fought for JJ Abrams to make his feature directing debut on Mission: Impossible 3 (they produced Ghost Protocol together) also embraced Brad Bird to make his live-action directing debut this time around.
There will obviously be another Mission: Impossible, but those talks haven’t really gotten underway yet. Cruise, who opens in June in Rock Of Ages for Warner Bros, is shooting the Christopher McQuarrie-directed One Shot for Paramount (releasing February 2013), then goes right into the Joseph Kosinski-directed Oblivion for Universal in March (releasing July 2013), followed by the Doug Liman-directed All You Need Is Kill for Warner Bros. Sequels often make it bigger to draw bigger numbers, and Jeremy Renner and the supporting cast helped, but with Ghost Protocol, Cruise has certainly answered questions about his place in the movie star food chain.
Source: Deadline
Tom Cruise talks to MTV about Top Gun 2. There’s a video on their website, which I can’t watch in my region (>.>). Here is the article from MTV.com:
“We’re working on it.”
That’s the official word on “Top Gun 2,” straight from the star himself, Tom Cruise, who spoke with MTV News’ Josh Horowitz during an event in Dubai for
In the fourth “M:I” movie, Cruise returns as castoff secret agent Ethan Hunt — the only character he has ever revisited during his decades-long career. The question remains: Will he ever don the Navy jumpsuit again and hop into a cockpit as Maverick?
A little more than a year ago, the Internet went abuzz with rumors about Cruise, director Tony Scott and producer Jerry Bruckheimer reuniting for a potential “Top Gun” sequel. Scott confirmed he would be directing, but Cruise’s involvement remained a mystery.
When Christopher McQuarrie, the writer of “The Usual Suspects” and the man hired to pen the script for “Top Gun 2,” said Maverick would be the lead for the follow-up, all engines seemed go. But then things went quiet. As the major players moved on to other projects — including “One Shot,” directed by McQuarrie and starring Cruise — sequel talk died down.
When Horowitz sat down with Cruise in Dubai, the actor updated the project’s status and shed new light on the script. “I don’t think Chris [McQuarrie] is going to write it,” Cruise said. “Chris is directing ‘One Shot’ right now, which I’m acting. We’ve got to go back in January and finish it.”
With McQuarrie out, that leaves Cruise, Scott and Bruckheimer as the only major players left with the project, but Cruise insists he could still do a sequel.
“I said to Tony I want to make another movie with him. He and I haven’t made a film since ‘Days of Thunder,’ ” Cruise said. “Tony and I and Jerry, we never thought that we would do it again. Then they started to come to us with these ideas of where it is now. I thought, ‘Wow, that would be … what we could do now.’ ”
For Cruise, the two key elements to a sequel would be a worthy script and the freedom to make the movie as they did in 1986. “I hope we can figure this out to go do it again,” he said. “If we can find a story that we all want to do, we all want to make a film that is in the same kind of tone as the other one and shoot it in the same way as we shot ‘Top Gun.’ ”
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 “Ratatouille†recording sessions with Peter O’Toole. It was a good story but one suspects Bird will walk away from his new project, “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,†with far more exotic memories.
The fourth film in the “Mission†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 — he is, quite literally, thinking big for this key career moment. But don’t think for a minute that he’s sour on his cartoon past.
“I’m not like some animation directors and like, ‘Thank God I’m out of animation and sitting at the adult’s table, I’m tired of sitting at the kid’s table,’†Bird said with a mock, raspy anger. “I have other ideas I’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 it’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 “Animalympics†in 1980 (produced, by the way, by “Tron†writer-director Steven Lisberger) and Disney’s “The Fox and the Hound†a year later.
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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
The magazine will be available this thursday, if anyone can scan it, I’d be forever grateful! I don’t get the magazine here
Empireonline.com Exclusive: ‘I’m very sensitive to it.’
There are casting calls so controversial that they look likely to reduce the internet to a smoking wasteland of charred avatars and ashen memes. Michael Keaton as Batman, Daniel Craig as Bond, The Last Airbender… that kind of thing. It’s fair to say that the choice of Tom Cruise to play Lee Child’s towering do-gooder Jack Reacher in One Shot has smoke pouring out of the web again.
With the movie currently filming in Pittsburgh, Empire tracked the man down to ask about the farrago. “Firstly, I’m very sensitive to it,” Cruise explained, revealing that Child came to watch his readings. “This is Lee’s book and Lee’s character. Him giving me his blessing is what made me do it. If he hadn’t then I wouldn’t have done it.”
And what of the discrepancy in height – Cruise giving away more than a few inches to the clock-brained legend? “Lee told me that the reason he wrote him that size (6′ 5″) is because that was just one element to his character, and that opened the door to me playing him.”
As Cruise himself is quick to point out, he’s no stranger to controversial casting. His pick to play Lestat in Neil Jordan’s Interview With The Vampire may have been pre-trolling, but it still caused a stink with fans of Anne Rice’s novel – and, briefly, with the writer herself.
No-one should doubt the actor’s commitment to the role, though. “Reacher is such a great character,” he enthused. “He doesn’t have a cell phone, he doesn’t have email. He’s off the grid. He pays for things in cash. People look at things through the prism of the colours of their life, but Jack Reacher does things the way we want to sometimes. In that sense he’s sort of a Dirty Harry, a James Bond, a Josey Wales.”
Source: Empireonline.com
The Hollywood Reporter analyzes how the actor continues to score new roles, despite near-death career moves.
Tom Cruise would make a great Survivor contestant. Despite his peculiar public image and less-than-stellar domestic box office in recent years, the 49-year-old has four big studio movies hitting theaters in the next 18 months: Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol in December, the now-filming One Shot for Paramount, June’s Rock of Ages for New Line and the untitled Joseph Kosinski sci-fi epic for Warner Bros. And THR has learned that Warners is again talking to the actor for the lead in its big-budget sci-fi war pic We Mortals Are (aka All You Need Is Kill), being directed by Doug Liman.
“The studios are interested in him again,” says one producer.
What a turnaround. When Mission: Impossible III opened in May 2006, the actor had been under siege for his over-excited Oprah appearance, his public stumping for Scientology and his anti- psychiatry rant on Today. MI-3’s $398 million worldwide gross was nearly 30 percent less than the previous film’s global take.
Paramount soon cut ties with Cruise/Wagner Prods., then Lions for Lambs bombed in 2007 for MGM, where Cruise had taken over as head of its United Artists label, a gig that also led nowhere. Meanwhile, his November 2006 marriage to Katie Holmes seemed only to provoke mass eye-rolling.
An apology-laden PR offensive erased some of the damage to Cruise’s reputation. But while his funny cameo in Tropic Thunder drew praise, Valkyrie and Knight and Day were considered under- performers, at least in the U.S. War of the Worlds was his last unqualified success, with $591 million in worldwide grosses dur- ing summer 2005 — a lifetime ago in Hollywood terms. So what’s behind his sudden resurgence?
One: Need. Movie stars are an increasingly rare breed, and new ones aren’t solidifying. Cruise still delivers internationally, as evidenced by the $186 million foreign gross for Knight and Day, and he has the added benefit of looking (and playing) younger than his years. He’s also hardworking, reliable and invested. “When you have somebody with that good a track record, there’s always the potential for the audience to support that person they’ve had a long relationship with,” says Paramount’s Rob Moore, who sees the new Jack Reacher character in One Shot as another Cruise franchise.
Two: Goodwill. “He’s good at wooing people,” says one studio exec. “He makes it a priority to meet the next generation of execs and is one of the few actors who goes out of his way to shake people’s hands to get back in their good books.” According to insiders, one person Cruise has gotten close to is Skydance Productions president David Ellison, who is co-financing both Protocol and One Shot and shares Cruise’s love of airplanes and flying.
Three: Adaptability. Cruise and his CAA agents have proved to be flexible on dealmaking, meaning he’s working cheaper at times — sources say he’s getting just $5 million for Ages — and structuring deals to lower upfront fees in exchange for backend participation that has greater upside in success.
Four: Commitment. Cruise has always understood what a movie star is and how he’s supposed to behave, and he’s been tireless in playing that role. Excepting the chaotic missteps of 2005-06, he’s always been a smart public figure “willing to do the job of being a movie star,†as one producer puts it. Unlike Russell Crowe or Jim Carrey, who rarely attempt to mend breaks with their fans, Cruise, like friend Will Smith, is a constant, enthusiastic campaigner for his own stardom. That accessibility to the wider world translates to tens of millions in ticket sales.
Cruise is not as big a star as he once was. But his approval ratings among filmgoers seem to have turned a corner, even if he has softer- than-desired traction with the under- 25 demo and some portion of the female audience. “Anecdotally, the polarization you once heard isn’t here anymore,” says a Hollywood marketing consultant. And his overseas prowess remains strong — the rest of the world still loves Maverick.
TOM CRUISE’S UPS AND DOWNS
Oprah’s Couch (May 2005): His public image takes a hit when, professing his love for Katie Holmes, he jumps the couch. War of the Worlds (June 2005) Rebounds with the help of Steven Spielberg as alien invasion movie grosses $592 million worldwide. South Park Parody (Nov. 2005): The “Trapped in the Closet” episode mocks him, and Comedy Central cancels a rerun. Mission: Impossible III (May 2006) His third outing as agent Ethan Hunt disappoints, stalling at $398 worldwide. Exit Paramount (Aug. 2006): Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone sours on him, ending his 14-year relationship with the studio. Enter United Artists (Nov. 2006): He and producing partner Paula Wagner find a new mission ressurecting UA. Knight and Day (2010): American audiences aren’t impressed, but the movie more than doubles its domestic gross of $76 million overseas.
Paramount Pictures is putting a super-sized version of the Tom Cruise-starrer in the large format theaters on December 16, ahead of wide release on December 21, 2011.
TORONTO – Imax is giving Paramount Pictures’ Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol a sneak peek preview from Friday, Dec. 16, ahead of a wide release on Dec. 21, 2011.
The move marks the first early engagement for a domestic feature, according to Toronto-based Imax.
Brad Bird’s Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol stars Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg and Paula Patton.
Imax is also to include around 30 minutes of scenes shot with its proprietary cameras when it rolls out the fourth installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise.
One featured Imax sequence includes a stunt performed by Cruise as he scaled the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa Tower in Dubai.
“Brad Bird’s Mission: Impossible will be among the highlights of the holiday movie season and we’re very happy to share the film with audiences early in Imax,” said Rob Moore, vice chairman of Paramount Pictures.
As part of the Formula 1 return in the United States after a four-year absence, the producer and star of Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol, Tom Cruise, took a break from post-production work and accepted the invitation to test drive the Red Bull Racing Formula One car in Southern California on the 15th of August.
The former driver of the Red Bull Racing team and 13-time Grand Prix winner, David Coulthard, was Tom Cruise’s personal instructor for the day, along with a 12-person support crew.
During the seven-hour session, the superstar completed 24 laps and managed to improve his initial lap time by almost 11 seconds.
“Tom’s the real deal. I was surprised that he picked it up so quickly and is such an accomplished driver. His recall was incredible considering how complicated driving an F1 car is. He’s a guy who really pushes the envelope in real life. This day was not green screened. He thoroughly impressed meâ€, said David Coulthard according to redbullusa.com.
The North American Grand Prix will be held at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas, which is currently under construction, and Formula One will return to the over-seas in 2012.
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