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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.
Why Tom Cruise joining forces with Warner Bros. is a bigger deal than you think
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.
Paula Wagner looking to exit UA - Hollywood Reporter
Paula Wagner looking to exit UA.
Posted: Wed, 13 Aug 2008 07:00:00 GMT [source]
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The film follows the life of famous 1970s runner Steve Prefontaine from his youth days in Oregon to the University of Oregon where he worked with the legendary coach Bill Bowerman, later to Olympics in Munich and his early death at 24 in a car crash. Wagner slammed Redstone last week, calling his comments "surprising" and unbusinesslike. She said it was their decision to walk away from a 14-year partnership with Paramount.
Time.com
This was the film production company of actor Tom Cruise and his former agent Paula Wagner, formed in July 1992 and often known as C/W Productions. At the time the company was formed, Wagner had been representing Cruise for 11 years. The company was formed to give Cruise more creative freedom over his film projects and to give him the opportunity to produce and direct motion pictures. Cruise/Wagner Productions, also abbreviated as C/W Productions was an American independent film production company. UA's future seemed uncertain after Sony, Comcast and a group of private equity firms acquired its parent MGM in 2004.
Beyond saying that the plan is to live up to the United Artists legacy of making talent feel like partners rather than employees, and a goal of releasing four to six films a year distributed by MGM, Ms. Wagner says that little else is set in stone. Sumner M. Redstone, the chairman of Viacom, Paramount’s owner, contended that he had fired Mr. Cruise for “inappropriate” behavior that had hurt his studio’s bottom line. Mr. Cruise’s defenders accused Mr. Redstone of grandstanding and said that, actually, both sides had already been planning to part amicably. The latter is responsible for some of the best work of Cruise’s late-stage career, and the former got McQuarrie what’s now clearly a much-deserved second chance as a director. Neither would be where they are now without the other, or without a 6’5”, 250-pound ex-military drifter whose pecs are so big they have rendered him immune to bullets. What is extraordinary is everything else about it, from DP Caleb Deschanel’s work behind the camera (the way that he stages the aforementioned shooting through the scope of the sniper’s rifle is inspired) to a stacked cast that includes everyone from Werner Herzog to Robert Duvall.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Drew Baylor is fired after causing his shoe company to lose hundreds of millions of dollars. On the verge of ending it all, Drew gets a new lease on life when he returns to his family's small Kentucky hometown after his father dies. When Ethan Hunt, the leader of a crack espionage team whose perilous operation has gone awry with no explanation, discovers that a mole has penetrated the CIA, he's surprised to learn that he's the No. 1 suspect. To clear his name, Hunt now must ferret out the real double agent and, in the process, even the score.
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...
But when he saw Mr. Cruise’s broad smile flashed across the evening news during the Paramount dust-up, he decided to give him and Ms. Wagner the UA shingle to hang. Mr. Cruise is not obligated to appear in any UA films, though the incentive of owning a large chunk of the print, as well as the bragging rights and perquisites that entails, is meant to be a strong motivator for him to ply his “day job — or night job,” as Ms. Wagner puts it, at UA. Journalist Stephen Glass, who rose to meteoric heights as a young writer in his 20s, becoming a staff writer at The New Republic for three years. Looking for a short cut to fame, Glass concocted sources, quotes and even entire stories, but his deception did not go unnoticed forever, and eventually, his world came crumbling down.
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.
The announcement that Cruise has now tied his mast to the Warner Bros. ship is therefore a big boon for the production studio. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has said he wanted to work with more top talent both in front and behind the camera, and you can’t get much bigger than Cruise. With computer genius Luther Stickell at his side and a beautiful thief on his mind, agent Ethan Hunt races across Australia and Spain to stop a former IMF agent from unleashing a genetically engineered biological weapon called Chimera. This mission, should Hunt choose to accept it, plunges him into the center of an international crisis of terrifying magnitude.
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