He's lost more "friends" in the past year than he's made in the past ten, but it'll be awhile before Tom Cruise notices any dents in his net worth Still, we can hardly conceal our delight that his most recent "vehicle" looks like it's waiting for the tow-truck to arrive. Gitesh Pandya, editor at BoxOfficeGuru.com, says the weaker-than-expected opening for Mission Impossible 3 maybe "a wake-up call to Hollywood to really look at its marketing." Pandya says H-Wood put it on Cruise-control, so to speak, overexposing the star as the essence of the movie. Problem is, a lot of movie-goers are up to here with the world's most famous Scientologist and his pretentious proselytizing. I'm waiting for him to show up on some talkshow soon and have the host call him a tiresome little twit. Don't count on it, though. They ought to sell bobbleheads of him and Donny Deutsch, along with a BB-gun pistol, but I digress. The "marketing" that Pandya calls for wouldn't have obsessed on the actor and would have started with the first step always called for in any marketing initiative. Namely, define your mission. At ESPN, boss George Bodenheimer simply says, "Serve the fans". How are movie-goers served in the marketing of a major motion picture? Rubbing their nose into an overexposed megastar who offends another couple-hundred thousand customers everytime he speaks something that isn't scripted? Or focusing on the slick, if superficial, quirkiness of whole M.I. shtick? "Mission Impossible" was all about escapism, romance, adventure, and not taking much very seriously. In other words, everything that its star is not synonymous with at the moment. But there's a silver lining to this brand case-study. Maybe, just maybe, the Tom Cruise era is drawing to a well-deserved fade-to-black.
Comment Preview