Why Tom Cruise wanted to star in the biggest bomb in cinema history: “He still had interest”
Spending four decades as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars and most bankable names doesn’t happen to somebody who makes a string of flop movies, which is precisely why Tom Cruise has remained at the top of the Tinseltown ladder for so long.
In an era where the brand has become more important to marketing than the actors, Cruise is one of the few A-listers left standing who can open a film at the box office based on nothing but their involvement. That makes him an outlier in the franchise and IP-obsessed era that shows no signs of dissipating, and there aren’t too many others who reside in that same exclusive club.
He isn’t immune to a misfire or two, though, with The Mummy losing a fortune, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back underperforming, and Rock of Ages falling flat, but lending his talents to three bombs in almost 20 years remains an impressive track record. Cruise is about as close to a guarantee of profitability as anyone can find in the industry, which makes it endlessly fascinating that he was so determined to headline the single biggest bomb in cinema history.
Outside of its generic title, a major issue many people had with Disney’s 2012 sci-fi blockbuster John Carter was that it felt so derivative. That was ironic in itself when Edgar Rice Burroughs’ source material had inspired everything from Flash Gordon and Superman to Star Wars and Dune, the very things it was accused of feeling so similar to.
The adaptation of Burroughs’ 1912 novel A Princess of Mars had spent decades languishing in development hell. Cruise – a lifelong fan of the book – first attached himself in the 1990s when John McTiernan was circling the director’s chair. A decade later, he still hadn’t given up on realising his dream to play John Carter, although eventual director Andrew Stanton decided to go in a different direction.
That worked out pretty well for Cruise, but not so much for Taylor Kitsch, who suffered the misfortune of taking top billing in two movies released weeks apart that combined to lose almost half a billion dollars for their respective studios.
“I had Taylor already in mind by the time Tom made his interest known,” Stanton recalled, per The Wrap. “Tom had a long history with the material, so it wasn’t too surprising to discover he still had an interest in it. He was a consummate professional in his discussions with me about the role and beyond respectful to the fact I was already on an audition path with Taylor.”
Even at that, the filmmaker and Cruise had “agreed to talk further if I were to pass on Taylor,” a conversation that didn’t need to happen. Kitsch’s big screen career has never recovered from the John Carter/Battleship debacle, but it’s curious to think how playing the lead role in the single biggest money-losing picture of all time would have affected the Mission: Impossible frontman’s standing if it would at all.
