Can Tom Cruise Overcome the Bad Buzz Dogging ‘Valkyrie’?

By Michael Cieply

When United Artists said this month that it would again delay the release of "Valkyrie," in which Tom Cruise plays a German officer who tries to kill Hitler, the Web went into obituary mode.

One Hollywood Internet site, thehotblog.com, declared, "Valkyrie is dead." Another, defamer.com, said the revival of United Artists had effectively died with it.

Meanwhile, Roger Friedman, a widely read Web reporter with a column on foxnews.com, had some career advice for Cruise: "He needs another ‘Jerry Maguire’-like romantic comedy, and he needs it now."

The death notices are remarkable in that United Artists, in its current form, was financed just eight months ago. And there is no way to be certain about "Valkyrie" until the film, first set for release in June, then October, and now Feb. 13, 2009, finally opens.

In the interim Cruise, his partners at United Artists and the "Valkyrie" filmmakers are bracing for what will most likely be a nine-month fight to prove their critics wrong. "We will not be daunted," Paula Wagner, chief executive of United Artists, said last week.

During an interview at the company’s headquarters, Wagner said she and her fellow executives were intent on overcoming negative reactions that she saw as rooted in ignorance of the process of building movie production companies.

"Anybody trying to dismiss us or write us off doesn’t understand the business," Wagner said.

Still, United Artists’ future will depend on reversing a growing perception – fed by an Internet culture that publicizes notions once confined to lunchtime gossipfests – that the studio took a wrong turn shortly after Wagner joined Cruise, her longtime producing partner, in agreeing a year and a half ago to reboot it as their own venture with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which had previously owned the company outright.

Cruise declined through a spokesman to be interviewed for this article. In a statement Harry Sloan, MGM’s chief executive, said he remained convinced of United Artists’ "promise and potential," and looked forward to marketing and distributing its movies. He made no specific mention of "Valkyrie."

In August the retooled United Artists received $500 million in backing through Merrill Lynch. It quickly released "Lions for Lambs," a poorly received drama that was directed by Robert Redford and featured Cruise with Redford and Meryl Streep. As that film took a drubbing from critics and audiences alike, United Artists bet again on Cruise with "Valkyrie," which is written by Christopher McQuarrie (with Nathan Alexander) and is being directed by Bryan Singer.

Wagner declined to discuss the film’s cost, which has been reported at about $100 million. She also declined to discuss the possible loss from "Lions for Lambs," which reported estimates have put as high as $50 million. The film is still playing abroad, where it has done far better than in the United States.

But the company, she said, soon expects to move ahead with two or three films, including a lower-budget concept comedy that will feature actors other than Cruise. That will, perhaps, draw some of the limelight from a business partner who, at the moment, appears to be both an asset and a liability.

That Cruise became involved with "Valkyrie" was initially seen as an unexpected boost for United Artists: Singer recruited him only after Wagner had already signed on to the movie. But a series of mishaps soon tainted the project. And that was particularly bad news for a company that will release nothing else before "Valkyrie" opens, and for a star whose main screen presence until then will be a much-talked-about cameo as a manic movie producer in the raunch comedy "Tropic Thunder."

The German authorities for a time refused permission to shoot "Valkyrie" in the Bendler Block in Berlin, where some of the story’s crucial moments occurred in real life. After a considerable commotion, permission was granted.

Then some of the film was damaged at the lab, requiring a brief reshoot that helped feed the notion that the movie was in trouble. That impression was reinforced by the fact that some scenes remain to be filmed, though they were always meant to be finished after the rest of the production. Singer is expected to shoot a desert sequence in the next two months, possibly in the United States.

According to company executives, the latest date change was intended to move "Valkyrie" from an early autumn schedule that has become increasingly crowded with Academy Award prospects to a more audience-friendly date on the long Presidents’ Day weekend in February.

But the rescheduling spurred still more talk, some of it far- fetched. One report, on an Asian news wire, said Cruise needed time with a dialect coach to refine his German accent. (Never mind that he speaks plain English throughout.)

Actually, Friedman, the Fox columnist, cited Cruise’s "hard California accent" among the points that persuaded him to tag "Valkyrie" as "one of the worst ideas for a film ever." Speaking by telephone last week, Friedman said much of the evidence he needed for that judgment was apparent in a trailer that has been available on the Web for weeks (imdb.com/title/tt0985699/trailers).

"There’s Tom with that big grin," said Friedman, who also took exception to the star’s eye patch, which he wears as Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg.

Occasionally such certitude can shatter a movie’s release. "Bram Stoker’s Dracula," directed by Francis Ford Coppola, was derided in Hollywood as "Bonfire of the Vampires" before it opened, referring to the notorious bomb "Bonfire of the Vanities." But "Dracula" did spectacular opening-weekend business and took in $83 million at the box office in 1992.

Speaking by telephone on Friday, Singer said he had experienced something similar when making "X-Men." Fans of the comic book, he recalled, obtained a picture of a stuntman in an awkwardly rigged Wolverine costume and concluded that Singer had bungled the film. As for "Valkyrie," he added: "People will be surprised. It isn’t going to be what people expect."

Originally published by The New York Times Media Group.

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