The Tom Cruise scene too steamy for cinema: “The sex was too much”
Jumping around like a madman on Oprah Winfrey’s couch has been pinpointed as the exact moment Tom Cruise stopped taking risks with his career, and rightly so. After all, the bad buzz and negative publicity surrounding his furniture-hopping antics had a noticeable effect on his previously bulletproof popularity.
The Oprah incident and his needless criticism of Brooke Shields and the entire psychiatry profession made the summer of 2005 one to forget. The A-lister was subsequently dropped by his longtime home studio paramount, his next picture – Mission: Impossible III – was and remains the lowest-grossing entry in the series and a rare detour into drama with Lions for Lambs bombed hard.
Since then, Cruise has basically been playing Tom Cruise. Sure, he buried himself under prosthetics for a memorable cameo in Tropic Thunder and sported an eye patch in the World War II dramatic thriller Valkyrie, but almost every other movie he’s made in the last two decades has leaned into his action hero persona and reputation as cinema’s pre-eminent daredevil actor. Almost.
The exception to the rule that’s defined his filmography since 2008 is Adam Shankman’s jukebox musical Rock of Ages, where he sported long, flowing hair as the middle-aged rockstar Stacee Jaxx. He also sported a fetching pair of assless chaps, but that’s beside the point and not something anyone is desperate to remember.
Fortunately, barely anyone saw the film, which limped to a miserly total of $59 million at the global box office to become Cruise’s second lowest-earning feature since Ridley Scott’s Legend, which had been released 27 years previously. The only one of his credits to make less money was Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, which is one of his best and arguably features his greatest performance.
Shankman’s rock opera may have been rated PG-13, but that might have been due to the filmmaker removing a steamy sex scene that alienated the target demographic. A misunderstanding involving Julianne Hough’s Sherrie Christian and Cruise’s Jaxx drives a wedge between her and Diego Boneta’s love interest, Drew Boley, but it could have been much more graphic.
“It really upset mothers,” Shankman explained of cutting a sex scene between Hough and Cruise, per Front Row Features. “The mothers literally turned against her character because she sold out and was such an animal in the scene. It was like she was too good. The sex was too much.”
Drew thinks Sherrie has slept with Jaxx to fracture their burgeoning relationship, but Rock of Ages almost made things a lot more explicit. Unfortunately for anyone who dreamed of seeing Cruise bumping uglies on the big screen with a woman half his age, which hopefully isn’t too many people, preview audiences were so aghast at what they were seeing that Shankman was left with no choice but to cut it out.
