The New Yorker:

When we watch the actor’s stunts, we are watching someone defy death, over and over again. It’s impossible to look away.

By Tyler Foggatt

In “Mission: Impossible III,” the third installment of the greatest action-film franchise of all time, Tom Cruise tells his fictional wife that she needs to kill him before he dies. It’s a classic Cruise conundrum: a villain has implanted an explosive charge in his head, and, to deactivate it, his wife must use a makeshift defibrillator that will disable the bomb but also stop his heart. Fortunately, the wife, played by Michelle Monaghan, is a nurse. (Earlier scenes of her being smiley with hospital personnel weren’t in vain.) She gamely electrocutes her husband to death, takes a quick break to shoot the bad guys in the room, and then performs CPR on Cruise. He bursts back to life and instinctively grabs his gun, ready to rejoin the fight.

As we’ve seen over the years, Tom Cruise can do almost anything—fly helicopters, free-climb cliffs, and even sing and play the guitar. Only rarely does he flop. But “Mission: Impossible III,” which came out in 2006, made less than four hundred million dollars globally—not much in the eyes of its distributor, Paramount. Sumner Redstone, then the chairman of Viacom, which owned Paramount, blamed these disappointing box-office numbers on Cruise. In the run-up to the film’s première, the actor had become extremely vocal about his involvement with the Church of Scientology and had given some unnerving talk-show interviews, jumping on Oprah’s couch and ranting about psychiatry in an exchange with Matt Lauer on the “Today” show. (“Do you know what Adderall is? Do you know Ritalin? Do you know now that Ritalin is a street drug?” Cruise asked Lauer, speaking with an urgency that amphetamine users could only envy.) Redstone estimated that Cruise’s antics had cost “Mission: Impossible III” up to a hundred and fifty million dollars in lost ticket sales, and Paramount announced later that year that it was ending its long-standing relationship with the star. “We don’t think that someone who effectuates creative suicide and costs the company revenue should be on the lot,” Redstone told the Wall Street Journal.

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