KNIGHT & DAY opens with just $3.4 million

As expected, the confused looking $100 million summer comedy/actioner Knight & Day is D.O.A., opening to a pitiful $3.8 million in the U.S. And that my friends, is that. The honeymoon of the dancing, MTV audience lovin' Tom Cruise in a fat suit, probably the most embarrassing parody act of any A-lister in recent memory -is well and truly over. The parody that in and of itself became a parody of Cruise attempting to clutch ever so tightly to his first significant connection with audiences in years, has accounted for nothing in the end, and question marks will continue to hang over the Cruisemeister's head as to whether he is capable of still being a box office draw in this industry. Unless things dramatically pick up over the weekend, the movie should end up with around $25 million on Monday morning. That's around $5 million less than the low-estimates we reported yesterday (Nikke Finke has quoted a rival studio exec that it's 'a number below even the most evil estimates') and it's the kind of figure that will get Paramount execs sweating over the budget of Mission Impossible 4. Will the fallout of Knight & Day be a $150 million sized fourth Ethan Hunt adventure turning swiftly into a $80 million vehicle, with Cruise now a 50/50 lead with an upstart protege, who can carry the franchise on in the future? It's very, very, possible. Of course this is not the end for Tom Cruise, far from it. As anyone who has read my writings over the last four years will atest to, Cruise is one of my favourite ever actors, and despite his awful career choices lately - he's only one right role away from winning his audience back. But it sure will be interesting to see where his next few career choices take him. MI:IV is now such a risky project for Paramount and who knows how nervous the studio will get over that production, and the Les Grossman movie just sounds ridiculous, and I doubt people will flock to see it. Personally, I just hope Cruise starts making some smart career a choices - a Judd Apatow comedy, or even a more conventional James L. Brooks or a Nancy Meyers film will do him the world of good. There was a time earlier in the year when Universal were courting Cruise to star in Lost for Words, a romantic comedy in which Cruise would play an American actor who gets embroiled into a love triangle with his beautiful Chinese director and the filmmaker€™s jealous translator. Chinese megastar Zhang Ziyi was set to co-star. With Cruise's worldwide popularity, especially in Asia, we thought this movie would be a given for Cruise and if I was his agent, I would be pushing for to make it a priority.