“We’ll see”: the 2012 movie Tom Cruise knew was “either going to work or be dreadful”
Being Tom Cruise must require an awful lot of self-confidence, so it wouldn’t be wrong to assume that he’d walk onto every set feeling pretty safe in his abilities to add yet another hit to a filmography that’s seen many more highs than lows over the last 40 years.
After all, he’s Tom Cruise, the biggest star in Hollywood. He might be weird, but he rarely puts a foot wrong, apart from that period in the mid-2000s when he used both of them to bounce up and down on a couch like a madman and found himself excommunicated from his home studio of Paramount for it.
No actor or filmmaker knows for sure how a movie will turn out until it’s been seen by an audience, but they all start the same way: everybody goes in with the best of intentions, and if things fly off the rails, then they’ll try their best. On the other hand, Cruise had the sneaking suspicion that he was heading down a definitive two-way street.
In most cases, it isn’t an either/or scenario: films can be great, good, mediocre, forgettable, disappointing, terrible, disgraceful, offensive, and everything in between. Cruise, who hasn’t been known for his risk-taking in a long time, had his eyes wide open and knew that Adam Shankman’s Rock of Ages carried one of two outcomes. It would be shit hot, or it would be plain old shit.
Ask his co-star, Alec Baldwin, and he’ll tell you. He summarised the jukebox musical as both “a horrible movie” and “a complete disaster,” unsuccessfully trying to persuade the studio to replace him. As for Cruise, he did what he always does and spent months meticulously preparing for his role.
As Stacee Jaxx, the long-haired, tattooed rock star, he sang five hours a day for five months to warm up his pipes, which must have been a fucking nightmare for anyone in the vicinity. He even earned an endorsement from Def Leppard, or that’s the way he remembers it, since the band shouting, “Fuck you!” at him doesn’t sound much like a compliment.
“Adam Shankman, the director, asked me if I could carry a tune,” Cruise said before Rock of Ages was released. “I said, ‘We’ll see, won’t we?’ This is either going to work, or it’s going to be dreadful.” Not to issue a spoiler for a movie that was released in 2012, but it was the latter, because it was utterly dreadful.
Disowned by Baldwin and the musical’s creator, Chris D’Arienzo, who flatly intoned that “America knew what sort of movie it was,” meaning shite, the picture bombed at the box office admit an apathetic reception from critics, general audiences, and people who enjoyed the stage production alike, essentially wasting five months of Cruise’s time for a performance nobody, at any point, gave a shit about.
At least he was honest, knowing that it could only go one of two ways, but being Cruise, you get the sneaking suspicion that he was a lot more confident that Rock of Ages would work than not. It didn’t work, so at least he technically wasn’t wrong.
