At this point in his career, there shouldn’t be much cause for behind-the-scenes drama when it comes to a Tom Cruise movie. Cruise wants to star in another Jack Reacher movie? Pay the man. Cruise wants to play a special forces operative fighting a centuries-old mummy? Pay the man. Cruise wants to release a movie where all he does is run for two hours? By all that is holy and good in this world, pay the man!

Shockingly, though, the executives in Hollywood do not adhere to my “blank check” policy regarding Tom Cruise’s career. On Friday, The Hollywood Reporter broke the news that pre-production for the latest Mission Impossible movie would be shutting down until Paramount Pictures and its star could come to an agreement over the amount of money Cruise would receive on the back end. According to the report, Cruise is apparently holding out for the same amount of profit-sharing he will receive on Universal Picture’s upcoming Mummy reboot.

And while it may ultimately be the difference between millions of dollars and millions of dollars and change, I do hope  that Cruise is able to get the deal he wants from Paramount Pictures. Hollywood financing can be such a quagmire of profit sharing and moving break even points; whenever an actor or director has enough clout to push back on a major studio, they should push as hard as they can to make up for the times they were forced to take whatever the studio offered them. Just make sure that profit-sharing is based on gross, Tom, or you may have held up production of your movie franchise for absolutely nothing.

As for how this delay will effect the release date, the article notes that Mission: Impossible 6 was previously set for a late 2017 release. If this hold out pushes the production date back any further than January, it would not surprise me to see Cruise’s latest film get pushed back to 2018.

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