Tom Cruise and Paramount are reportedly feuding over the Mission Impossible 7 theatrical window and now Cruise’s lawyers are involved.
The development of Mission Impossible 7 has been a wild ride— from last-minute submarine additions to multiple Covid fiascos to Tom Cruise rants on set. The latest is Paramount’s shifting position on what direction it wants to take with its streaming service and how it affects its movie slate as a whole, and more specifically how that pertains to the final two installments in the Mission Impossible franchise.
Tom Cruise’s normal theatrical window of three months is in jeopardy due to Paramount’s push for a 45 day window in order to bolster their streaming service. However, this is against the best interest of Cruise, who makes a large amount of his money from box office sales. The reason the studio doesn’t bull through Cruise’s interests is the amount of leverage he holds over the studio, as the actor is one of their top assets and has brought in $3.6 billion over the 30 years he’s played Ethan Hunt.
In fact, Cruise has so much leverage that he was even able to stop a Mission Impossible tv series from coming to fruition. With an ever bloating budget and multiple delays, there is a lot of talk around the future of the franchise at Paramount.
“You would make [Mission: Impossible] 7 and 8 even if you had a full slate,” a studio veteran points out. “They weren’t crazy expensive by the standards of Marvel, of Bond.”
At the pitch in London, there was a treatment but no scripts. “The hardest part of running a studio is your desperate need for tentpoles,” says an executive who has managed a previous Cruise film. “If you don’t have a locked script, it’s impossible to pencil [the budget] out.”
“Jim was bridging between what [Paramount’s] Shari [Redstone] and [president and CEO] Bob [Bakish] wanted and what Jim felt was the right thing to do,” which was to protect the relationship with Cruise. “Part of the reason [Jim] is gone is that Shari and Bob thought they could wave a magic wand” and persuade the star to accept the shortened window. This was not the case.
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“For him, 45 days is like going day-and-date,” says a Paramount source on Tom’s perspective.
“That was not an easy thing for Jim to have to do,” says an insider who was commenting on former Paramount CEO Jim Gianopulos’ pitch to Cruise. “Tom is so committed to theatrical.”
CEO and President Bob Bakish reportedly told Jim, “It’s going to be a very different studio going forward, like nothing you’ve ever run before,” before Gianopulos left.
A Paramount insider says Bakish conveyed “that going forward the studio was going to be much more closely integrated with the company.” This appeared to be code for catering the studio to the streaming service and away from big theatrical releases.
A familiar of Tom Cruise movies laughed at how Paramount and its executives would fair against the Mission Impossible star, “Tom says what he wants and the studio says what it wants. And then Tom gets what he asked for.”
