Star And Studio Are Hanging on Success of 'Valkyrie'

Brooks Barnes - International Herald Tribune

If there was a nervous moment at the showing Friday night of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's new James Bond movie, "Quantum of Solace," it came with a trailer for the studio's next big bet: The upcoming "Valkyrie," in which Tom Cruise plays a German officer who tried to kill Hitler.

The audience watched. Cruise loomed in all his uniformed glory as Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. And the appearance passed without a single hoot or holler.

It was not a bad start for a movie that has become unusually tangled in the fortunes of both its star and the company that made it.

"Valkyrie," directed by Bryan Singer, with an original script by Christopher McQuarrie, was conceived about 20 months ago as a dramatic showcase for Cruise. It was also a high-profile effort to kick-start United Artists, the MGM unit of which he and his producing partner, Paula Wagner, had become part-owners.

But Wagner has since resigned under pressure as United Artists' chief executive, while Cruise has cut back his involvement in the studio, which was never as day-to-day as Wagner's, and turned his attention to rebuilding his acting career. The movie, meanwhile, bounced from one intended release date to another, finally landing on Dec. 26, among a clutch of Oscar contenders and expensive Christmas-time competitors, including "Yes Man" with Jim Carrey and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" with Brad Pitt.

Along the way, "Valkyrie" has turned into a test not only of Cruise's career viability but of MGM's determination - with new ownership, and under the leadership of chairman Harry Sloan since 2005 - to be taken seriously as a producer and distributor of the kind of high-risk event films that define a major studio. If "Valkyrie" succeeds, even moderately, MGM wins a desperately needed modicum of credibility in image-is-everything Hollywood. A failure brings fresh sniping that the studio doesn't know what it is doing, making attracting top-notch talent to coming film projects even harder. Financially speaking, the stakes are considerable. With a stated production budget of $75 million - competitors insist it is closer to $90 million - "Valkyrie" is the most expensive film made for distribution by MGM under Sloan's watch. The studio will now spend over $60 million to market the movie - if nothing else, to make the point that it can play in the big leagues.

("Quantum of Solace" is much more costly, with insiders placing the production and marketing budget at about $400 million. But it was co-financed and co-distributed by Sony Pictures Entertainment.)

"Valkyrie" will also check the mettle of Cruise, 46: If it fails, his status as a super-star, damaged by a rough parting with Paramount Pictures in 2006, slips another notch. And this time United Artists - clipped once by a Cruise flop last year in the less costly "Lions for Lambs" - slips with it.

Cruise has become one of Hollywood's more puzzling assets. He is still pursued for projects and has enormous cachet: Few stars have reliably drawn the kind of audience he attracted even to "Mission: Impossible III," which took in nearly $400 million at the worldwide box office in 2006. Yet he has been a magnet for negativity, fed in part by hostility to his association with Scientology, perhaps more by the delay of the "Valkyrie" release and his two-year absence from the screen, other than relatively modest roles in "Lions for Lambs" and last summer's "Tropic Thunder."

And just as Hollywood will scrutinize the outcome of "Valkyrie," so will the potential investors MGM has been aggressively courting, so far to no avail. Following Wagner's ouster five months ago, Sloan stepped up his hunt for a new, $650 million production fund to bankroll his new motion picture team's ambitious slate of films, including two installments of "The Hobbit" and the next James Bond film, of which MGM has sole custody. "There's no doubt that we're going to get the money," he said at the time.

But that hunt is now dead, according to two bankers with knowledge of the matter, due in part to the global economic crisis but also because of MGM's already staggering $3.7 billion debt load. Options remain - taking out loans against expected revenue from "Quantum of Solace" and "Pink Panther 2," due next year, or dipping into its own cash reserves - but are unfavorable.

Sloan and other MGM executives declined to be interviewed for this article, as did Cruise.

Jeff Pryor, the company's chief spokesman, sent a 1,000-word e- mail message proclaiming the studio's finances robust. "MGM is not having financial problems," Pryor wrote. "MGM is not planning any large scale financial cutbacks or employee layoffs ... the studio has no short or midterm liquidity issues ... MGM is not for sale ... MGM has extremely solvent shareholders."

By various accounts, Cruise has scaled down his involvement with United Artists since Wagner resigned in August - perhaps signaling that stardom and studio management ultimately do not mix.

Both continue to own a stake in the company, and Cruise maintains an office at the MGM high-rise in Century City, California. But Wagner now produces films on her own. Cruise meanwhile has focused on plans to star in a next movie for another company. Mary Parent, chairman of MGM's motion picture group, has largely taken charge of United Artists, although the unit continues to employ its own marketers and chief operating officer.

A leading candidate for Cruise's next film is "The Tourist," an action-thriller financed by Spyglass Entertainment Holdings. Tentatively set for production in the spring, its script is being rewritten by McQuarrie - who originated the "Valkyrie" project - at the insistence of Cruise.

If that points to Cruise's continued faith in "Valkyrie," he is not alone. Speaking on condition of anonymity to minimize conflict, more than a dozen people involved with "Valkyrie" and MGM described a campaign in which the studio and its allies for months have been quietly fighting to change the public perception of a film they believe was unfairly tainted by knee-jerk hostility toward the casting of Cruise as a German war hero.

Insiders feel the company has corrected early blunders, successfully repositioning the film as a character-driven suspense thriller. The mood inside MGM is not exactly euphoric regarding the release but is not anywhere near foreboding, either.

To some extent, saving the movie has meant soft-pedaling the star. Billboards that blossomed around Los Angeles last week flank a barely recognizable figure of Cruise with five fellow actors and three slogans. The last of them, notably group-oriented, reads: "The conspiracy begins this December."

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