Tom Cruise update
The Six Flags Chairman and Washington Redskins owner will put up about $3m a year to cover Tom Cruise’s office and staff costs. While this is a far cry from the $10m Tom and co. used to get from Paramount, he lives to fight another day and the world is a better place for it.
And just so we don’t confuse this money with the other money coming to Tom, this is NOT, I repeat, NOT part of the $100m his handlers claimed was forthcoming from unnamed hedge funds.
In related news, the Times talks about Superstar Economics and remarks that in fact,
only seven actors and actresses — Tom Hanks, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sandra Bullock, Jodie Foster, Jim Carrey, Barbra Streisand and Robin Williams — had a positive impact on the box office, mostly in the first few weeks of a film’s release. In the same study, two directors, Steven Spielberg and Oliver Stone also pushed up a movie’s revenue. But Winona Ryder, Sharon Stone and Val Kilmer were associated with a smaller box-office revenue. No other star had any statistically significant impact at all.
And because my geekhood knows no bounds, here’s a site where you can trade “stocks” for individual movies. Because hundreds of thousands of people do, it’s a fairly good predictor of a movie’s box office performance.