Check out the new teaser trailer and poster for Mission: Impossible III. Let’s discuss the absence from most of this material of the movie’s star, one Tom Cruise.
The War of the Worlds marketing was all about Cruise, as were the headlines surrounding the movie’s release. Unfortunately for Paramount, most of those headlines were regarding his various public rants/breakdowns about Katie Holmes and Scientology. If he wasn’t punching couches then he was verbally sparring with Matt Lauer and insulting Brooke Shields. While the movie was relatively successful, he was definitely a liability when it came to public relations for the movie. Not surprisingly, his publicist at the time was his sister, who I don’t imagine could take him into a room and give him the “you’re screwing up your career” speech every other PR person in the world would have/wanted to.
So in this first batch of material he is completely absent from the poster. That’s not that shocking since it is a teaser and matches the theme of the previous sequel. In the trailer, though, he doesn’t get a single line. Not one. I watched it twice to make sure. He glares at Philip Seymour Hoffman (what the hell?) and then spends the rest of the 1:36 running and jumping and getting blown into things. That lasts until the very end, when Ving Rhames greets him, but still Cruise doesn’t speak. What do you think the logic is behind this, and what does this say about Cruise’s stock in Hollywood right now? Is he openly being outed as a potential liability to this movie after last summer’s fiasco? You have to think that essentially cutting Cruise out of the opening marketing salvo is the sign of some sort of seismac shift in attitude toward the star.
