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In 1994, director Neil Jordan and screenwriter Anne Rice gave fans of Interview With the Vampire an adaptation to sink their teeth into. Based on Rice's 1976 novel of the same name, the drama-horror was headlined by a star-studded cast that included Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Christian Slater. It also featured early performances by actors who would go on to achieve major success, such as Thandie Newton and Kirsten Dunst. In anticipation of the movie's 25th anniversary, The Hollywood Reporter checks in with the actors who starred in 'Interview With the Vampire,' including Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Kirsten Dunst. But the answer to questions about his commitment may lie in another meeting he and Ms. Wagner held in Mr. Sloan’s office just a few days before the deal was announced last November. Knowing that Mr. Cruise and Ms. Wagner would need to exit the Paramount lot in a hurry, Mr. Sloan offered them office space on the 11th floor of the MGM tower.
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First & Goal was specifically set up to invest in Cruise/Wagner, as Snyder moves from sports to entertainment along with partners Dwight Schar, chairman of homebuilder NVR Inc., and Mark Shapiro, president and CEO of Six Flags Inc., the amusement park chain where Snyder serves as chairman of the board. Last week, Wagner said her company had secured funding from two hedge funds, a separate arrangement from the deal with First & Goal. Learn how this low-budget film influenced the plot, the production design, and even the lighting...
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Mr. Sloan calls his venture with Mr. Cruise an “interesting experiment” that he might extend to other dormant MGM brands like Orion Pictures. He also says that other artists could unite with Mr. Cruise and Ms. Wagner as equity owners of UA. Mr. Sloan considered selling the UA brand name because it was doing nothing more for MGM than gathering dust in a closet.
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The deal announced Monday between Cruise/Wagner productions and First & Goal LLC — headed by Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder — will cover overhead and development, allowing Cruise and producing partner Paula Wagner to run their company and make deals to produce films. ONE of the lingering questions about UA is how well Ms. Wagner will fare in putting out four to six films a year, when she and Mr. Cruise previously averaged just one movie a year as producers aligned with Paramount. It is also unclear how Mr. Cruise will manage his loyalties and time among the many professional roles he juggles both inside and outside of UA. Last month, for instance, the Hollywood trades reported that he plans to make a comedy with Ben Stiller as the co-star at 20th Century Fox. FOR Harry Sloan, meanwhile, the raging headlines about Mr. Cruise gave him a flash of inspiration. After taking charge of MGM in 2005 at the behest of its main investors, Providence Equity Partners and the Texas Pacific Group, Mr. Sloan set out to revive the company, which also counts Sony and Comcast as investors.
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Rather than the overhead deal they had at Paramount, Mr. Sloan proposed establishing an autonomous studio within a larger studio — a structure akin to the relationship that Mr. Spielberg’s studio, DreamWorks, now has with Paramount, but with real ownership attached. Under these new business arrangements, big-name producers can control nearly every aspect of filmmaking — even the most exalted perk, the ability to greenlight a picture. Big studios remain crucial to a film’s success under this new model, but largely as marketers and distributors. Ms. Wagner is the chief executive of UA — as the studio is commonly known — while Mr. Cruise bears no official title except, perhaps, the world’s most famous movie star. Unlike Ms. Wagner, Mr. Cruise does not draw a salary from UA, according to a person with direct knowledge of the arrangement. The idea is that his ownership stake alone will align the interests of Tom Cruise the actor with Tom Cruise the studio grandee.
Wagner and Tom Cruise were the founders, it has grossed more than $2.9 billion in box office proceeds since its inception. Ms. Wagner carries herself with the poise of someone who once worked as a theater actress and a talent agent before becoming Mr. Cruise’s collaborator and the public face of his entrepreneurial and filmmaking ambitions. Mr. Cruise declined to be interviewed for this article, because, Ms. Wagner says, he prefers that she speak publicly about their mutual business interests. All of them experienced mixed results as they ran up against the brutal economics of a hit-and-miss industry in which independents often lack the size needed to overcome the financial vagaries of filmmaking. According to people involved in the talks, the question of whether Mr. Cruise, whom Mr. Sloan did not know previously, was past his prime or a loose cannon came up, particularly among MGM’s private equity investors.
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Earlier this summer, a studio head chided Lindsay Lohan for her behaviour on a movie set in a letter leaked to the press, and an ABC deal with Mel Gibson's production company to produce a four-part series on the Holocaust was cancelled after his alleged anti-Semetic remarks during a drunk-driving arrest. Tom Cruise's production company has signed a two-year financing deal with an investment partnership after breaking ties last week with Paramount Pictures. Cruise's first post-Paramount professional announcement was underwhelming for a star who had generated $3 billion at the box office in his 14 years at the studio. In August, Cruise/Wagner secured a two-year financing deal with First and Goal L.L.C., an investor group headed by Daniel Snyder, owner of the Washington Redskins and chairman of the Six Flags amusement parks. Since then, Cruise seemed more interested in cheering at his kids' soccer games and planning his wedding to Katie Holmes this month in Italy than acting or deal-making. What emerged was what Ms. Wagner describes as a hybrid between a studio and a production company.
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Mr. Sloan, an entertainment lawyer turned entrepreneur, founded SBS Broadcasting in Europe in the early 1990s and sold it three years ago for $2.6 billion. The venture made him a tidy fortune, an undisclosed portion of which he has reinvested in MGM. As the mood in Hollywood changed and Paramount offered a greatly reduced production deal, Ms. Wagner says that she and Mr. Cruise decided that it was time for a change. Following the lead of other successful producers like Ivan Reitman and Joel Silver, they wanted to tap into the new Wall Street and hedge fund money flowing into Hollywood. At a recent party, Peter Bart, the editor in chief of Variety, greeted Mr. Cruise and mentioned that for a two-year period in the 1980s he, too, had been a senior executive at United Artists. “I know,” Mr. Cruise replied instantly, and proceeded to list all the movies made under Mr. Bart’s tenure, Mr. Bart recalled in an interview.
Over the next two months, the three conducted a series of private meetings at Mr. Sloan’s office and home that involved contingents of lawyers and agents. Mr. Cruise, Mr. Redford and Ms. Streep have all deferred their usual upfront fees or percentages of gross revenue in exchange for cumulatively splitting half of the film’s profit with UA. It’s unclear as of now how this deal between Cruise and Warner Bros. will manifest and what films will follow. Particularly for his decisions to slash budgets, removal of TV series from streaming (Westworld) and shelving films altogether (Batgirl).
A promotional reel that Mr. Sloan shows investors in MGM’s penthouse screening room makes plain that many of the best-known titles in the current MGM film library — from “The Apartment” to “West Side Story” — were United Artists releases. Regardless, the media firestorm and scrutiny of Mr. Cruise’s career and conduct only intensified when, two months later, Mr. Cruise and Ms. Wagner landed at United Artists, which through different owners has hewed in varying degrees to its founding ideals of artistic hegemony. Whatever Cruise’s physique prevents him from bringing to the role of Jack Reacher — though his performance is as locked in as ever, all simmering rage and gritted jaws and rarely ever smiling — McQuarrie’s script and directing make up for in spades. Jack Reacher is a down-the-middle adult thriller directed with a Hitchcockian eye, meticulously composed and paced with an attention to detail rare in this sort of film. Like all great mysteries, every answer to the questions the audience will spend the film asking is present in the opening set piece. The actor-studio deal could also have wider ramifications around industry rumours that Warner Bros. and Paramount are considering a merger.
The spat between the star of Top Gun, War of the Worlds and the Mission Impossible movies, and Paramount is the latest example of tension between actors and executives after what Hollywood analysts are calling a down summer for film revenues. That November, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios came to Cruise/Wagner with a deal that gave them a percentage of the ownership of United Artists in a effort to revive the company. The deal fell apart in August 2008 when Wagner left the studio, effectively ending the company. Now Tom Cruise is taking his star power to Warner Bros. to produce a new wave of films. In anticipation of the movie's silver anniversary, The Hollywood Reporter checks in with the actors who breathed life into the dead and undead characters of Interview With the Vampire.
Zaslav met Paramount Global CEO Bob Bakish in December about a potential deal between the $29 billion (€26 billion) and $10 billion (€9 billion) companies, respectively. Cruise himself said that “I have great respect and admiration for David, Pam, Mike, and the entire team at Warner Bros. Discovery and their commitment to movies, movie fans, and the theatrical experience,” in a Warner Bros. press release.
Cruise/Wagner Productions, also abbreviated as C/W Productions, was an American independent film production company. Wagner had been representing Cruise for eleven years before the formation of C/W Productions. The company has grossed more than $2.9 billion in box office proceeds since its inception.
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