A cruise into summer blockbuster battle season

You may have noticed — judging by the size of billboards, the number of explosions rocking your ears during trailers and the stench of testosterone in the air — that this is the first year since the end of the pandemic that summer blockbuster season has returned to its former bombastic glory.

In case you needed further convincing, consider the battle of egos in the US between ageless megastar Tom Cruise and director Christopher Nolan, the 21st century’s reincarnated Stanley Kubrick, over who should get first dibs on the country’s IMAX screens during prime time in July.

In the US, the large format IMAX experience accounts for about a third of all cinema screens. Nolan, as one commentator noted, has become something of an “unofficial brand ambassador for IMAX” by regularly shooting his epic films using cameras specifically designed to capitalise on the technology. He shot his latest film — Oppenheimer, a sweeping historical epic starring Cillian Murphy as the complicated man who led the Manhattan Project — entirely on IMAX large-format cameras and his release date was slated by Universal back in July 2021 for late July 2023.

Cruise isn’t happy about it and has been aggressively pushing for IMAX theatres to bump Nolan’s magnum opus in favour of the short-but-buff action hero’s seventh repetition of the depressingly bankable Mission Impossible franchise. This has put IMAX in a difficult position — Cruise’s last outing, the $1.29bn grossing Top Gun: Maverick, made $110m of its profits from IMAX screenings. It’s more than likely, given post-Covid-19 cinema audiences’ general bad taste, laziness and lack of imagination, that MI7 will make more money than an ambitious, visually inventive film about the existential angst of a man  — who though Nolan claims “was the most important man in history” — most postnuclear-age viewers don’t know anything about or have any interest in.

Cruise is wary enough of Nolan’s reputation and box office success to feel that the current schedule — on which MI7 opens in theatres on July 12 and is then booted from IMAX theatres for Oppenheimer’s exclusive three-week IMAX release on July 21 — will cause a significant dent to MI7’s final profits and its star’s pay cheque. IMAX charges more for tickets and Cruise is intent on getting MI7 into as many premium theatres as possible in order to boost its box office takings. Though industry insiders say that the agreements are locked and not much can be done about it, Cruise — ever the determined man of action on screen and off — has been running around the US desperately screening his film for IMAX theatre managers and trying to convince them to bump Oppenheimer from their programming schedules.

That’s even though MI7 is not made specifically for IMAX technology, whereas Oppenheimer has been shot entirely on IMAX 70mm film and will mark the first time in history that black and white footage has been created with the technology in mind. Cruise is aware that the summer’s other big release — Greta Gerwig’s Barbie — is also threatening his film’s ability to make the most of premium screenings as it is scheduled for release on the same weekend as Oppenheimer. This has already led to an online meme craze suggesting that come the end of July, boys will be going to see Nolan, girls to see Barbie, and no-one will see Cruise.

Once the dust from the battle of the summer blockbusters has cleared, final box office tallies will probably favour Cruise, but for now the 60-year-old whose on-screen presence has pretty much guaranteed box office gold for almost four decades, seems a little overly concerned that films and directors are coming up behind him that don’t need him or repetitive pyrotechnic, stunt-fuelled, luxury globe-trotting to pique interest.

Meanwhile, in Amsterdam, in a beef that is lower-level but more bizarre, a public and bitter feud between the bad boy of French letters, Michel Houellebecq, and maverick Dutch art collective Keep It Real Art Critics (KIRAC), is taking ever more surreal turns and making observers question whether the whole thing may be some sort of twisted art performance film.

KIRAC had entered into an agreement to shoot a film about Houellebecq and recorded more than 600 hours of footage of the novelist, including scenes in which he lasciviously made out with young women. When it put together a two-minute trailer that included a scene describing his cancellation of a Moroccan “honey trip” for fear of Islamic terrorism and referred to his wife’s role in securing prostitutes from Paris for the intended holiday — Houellebecq blanched.

He went to court to stop KIRAC from running the trailer on its online platforms, claiming it violates his privacy and damages his — admittedly already controversial and often politically sketchy — image. A French court rejected his case but Houellebecq has since taken the case to the Netherlands where his complaint has been upheld and he has been granted the right to see the final cut of any re-edited film a month before its scheduled release. This, as the New York Times pointed out this week, will give him plenty of time “to file another action if he doesn’t like what he sees”.

Houellebecq has published a 94-page memoir of the experience in which he refers to KIRAC leader Stefan Ruitenbeek as a “pseudo-artist” and a “cockroach with a human face”. That seems to be all the cue Ruitenbeek needed to gatecrash an Amsterdam launch of the book last week, dressed as a cockroach and shouting, “I’m here! I’m the cockroach!” while members of the collective filmed him. Houellebecq didn’t get to physically squash his Kafkaesque nemesis but the whole debacle now has observers questioning whether any of it is real or it is all some sort of surreal happening for a film that more people than its subject may one day get to see.