In case you missed all the billboards and guest spots on television, Tom Cruise has a new movie coming out. There was the Toothy One, grinning in the wee-morning hours at Today show host Matt Lauer, offering before their sit-down interview to get doughnuts for the newscaster that our man Tom three years back demeaned as "glib" for asking those pesky questions journalists sometimes ask. But this is the new Tom Cruise. He appeared the next night on Late Show with David Letterman, poking fun at himself in a Top 10 list that included the Scientologist's belief that "all emotional and physiological disorders can be cured with Vicks VapoRub."
Chalk one up for Tom's handlers, who have returned the once-popular star from whatever alternative universe he had been inhabiting. And none too soon. Cruise's next film, the Nazi-themed thriller Valkyrie, in which the star plays a German officer leading a plot to kill Adolf Hitler, sure as heck needs the audience to be booing the Führer instead of Cruise.
MGM, which is releasing the flick through its United Artists unit, desperately needs the film to show that it, too, is back from the same dark place as Cruise. This is a studio with hefty debt, a steady steam of box-office bombs, and a revolving door in the corner office that saw Cruise's producing partner brought in to run the United Artists studio with Cruise and then getting the boot less than two years later.
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