“Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” has a very different villain than we’ve seen so far in the franchise. Though there are human antagonists punching it out with Ethan Hunt, the big bad is a machine, an artificial intelligence referred to as The Entity. Granted, it is a very vague and convoluted villain, apt for a very vague and convoluted plot.
Turns out, either real life has an equally convoluted plot, or “Dead Reckoning Part One” is not so far-fetched anymore, because Tom Cruise is pulling a real-life Ethan Hunt move and fighting artificial intelligence — at the negotiating table
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Cruise joined a Zoom negotiating meeting to urge the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers to stop being soulless greedy villains worthy of The Entity and come to the table to hear out SAG-AFTRA’s concerns about AI.
Of course, this is Tom Cruise, a man of cinema, who loves popcorn more than anything on this planet, so he wasn’t going to just leave the Zoom meeting without also supporting stunt performers (even if he refuses to give them work by doing his own most dangerous stunts and continuing to defy death on a yearly basis).
Cruise does love the movies
Unfortunately, not even Tom Cruise can convince the studio heads to stop being ghouls, as we know that the counter proposal by the AMPTP that would “protect actors’ digital likenesses” actually was about only paying background actors for a single day of work, before scanning their digital likeness which the studios could use in perpetuity and for free. This is a proposal so vile only the creator of “Jurassic Park” could come up with it.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, calling in actors to negotiating sessions between SAG-AFTRA and the studios is not uncommon, as they rely on the actors’ expertise, but no other A-list actors of Tom Cruise’s caliber were asked to join the negotiations like this.
If we know one thing about Tom Cruise is that he loves movie theaters (again, he loves popcorn too), as shown by that weird photoshoot holding movie tickets with director Christopher McQuarrie, or the fact that he made a big deal out of seeing “Tenet” at the height of lockdown.
We also know Cruise is also unafraid to yell at everyone to get what he wants — though he couldn’t prevent “Oppenheimer” from taking IMAX screens from “Mission: Impossible.” Still, his enthusiasm pays off sometimes, like with how ludicrously successful “Top Gun: Maverick” was, that even Steven Spielberg told Cruise, “You saved Hollywood’s ass.”