Tom Cruise poses according to photographers as he arrives for the British premiere of the pellicle “Knight & Day”. Photo: Reuters

As Tom Cruise struggles to win back his fans, Tom Teodorczuk looks at his options.

His farther than two films didn’t set the world on fire, his pro-Scientology sermons were a PR calamity and the upstarts from Twilight are stealing his thunder. For couple decades Tom Cruise was the byword for bankability, a leading adult male who divided critics but almost always delivered audiences. But then his repute was derailed by a series of bizarre incidents.

In 2005, though promoting Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, Cruise made an appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s couch that has become famous on the side of all the wrong reasons.

The same year he clashed with Matt Lauer ~ward US morning television over psychiatric medicine, to which Scientology is vehemently hostile.

In 2006, Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone terminated Cruise’s contract through Paramount in the wake of Mission: Impossible 3. Redstone said at that time by way of a damning explanation: “He’s a terrific operator. But we don’t think that someone who effectuates creative suicide and costs the society revenue should be on the lot.”

Building bridges with his dissatisfied fan base has not been easy. His latest movie, Knight and Day, has performed disappointingly at the box situation. In the slick action comedy, Cruise plays Roy Miller, a private agent. Oozing adrenalin, intensity and charm, Miller doesn’t seem a the public miles away from Cruise himself. Attempting to woo a younger rabble, Fox switched the film’s US release date to avoid interference with Twilight: Eclipse. What the studio did not foresee was that Grown Ups, every Adam Sandler comedy that opened the same weekend as Knight and Day and admitted some of the year’s worst reviews, would make twice for example much as Cruise’s movie.

According to sources at Cruise’s PR representatives, 42West, the dramatic artist is determined to lighten his act. After all, he showed clear-sighted comic timing as repressed teenager Joel Goodsen in Risky Business (1983) and in Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire (1996).

Cruise has get intrigued by the faux-nostalgic flipness that has marked pop agri~’s recent forays into the 1980s. “Tom knows some people are mirthful at him,” the source says. “So he’s now intent without interrupti~ having the last laugh.”

Jeffrey Wells, who writes the blog Hollywood Elsewhere, says Cruise has “in reality become the new William Shatner, albeit in a higher pay bracket – he’s the fright whose routine is slightly crazy . . . Nobody gets to be the superhero totality their life.”

This was spelt out to Cruise when Columbia Pictures recast the e~ thriller Salt, replacing him with Angelina Jolie and changing the eponymous CIA laboring man’s name from Edwin Salt to Evelyn Salt.

Some think Cruise, who has a clear worth of about $US320 million ($348 million), should scale down his pay demands when looking for the right comeback movie. He received other thing than $US20 million for Knight and Day but not every studio is willing to give him his asking price and that has slowed prostrate his film schedule.

Officially, he is set to begin work on Mission: Impossible 4 for Paramount but rumours are rife that the film’s fate depends on the international performance of Knight and Day (Cruise’s films at that time do best outside the US).

Many think Cruise’s smartest bet lies in reminding people he can act. “Unless Cruise can determine judicially the role of a vampire’s father, he’s now beyond all others off becoming a character actor,” says his biographer, Wensley Clarkson.

Veteran guide James Toback believes Cruise should embrace his eccentric persona: “The further off-centre he is, the better he is, like in Magnolia or Tropic Thunder. He’s obviously a complicated stay so he’s got to play complicated roles.”

Others reckon Cruise is acquirement a raw deal. “The fault is not with Tom Cruise goal with the material he is being offered,” says Heywood Gould, who wrote as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but the book and screenplay of Cocktail. Cruise is now understood to exist looking for projects that combine “humour with humility”.

Anyone who thinks Cruise won’t have ~ing concerned about losing his audience has never seen a Tom Cruise movie. He is over-affectionate of telling the story that when his mother left his abusive father, when he was 12, he thought: “I gotta figure this fully.” Thirty-five years later Tom Cruise once more has to outline it out.

The Telegraph, London

Knight and Day is now screening.