10 Actors Who Had Too Much Creative Control
1. Tom Cruise In The Mummy
Maybe cinema's greatest disaster story, The Mummy was a mess from minute one. What was meant to kick off a cinematic universe akin to the MCU instead became the poster child for playing your hand a little too early. Both a critical and commercial failure, The Mummy floundered like a fish out of water.
From the outset, it seems easy to blame the poor script and flat direction from Alex Kurtzman, but the production history is more complex than that. Soon after The Mummy crashed into theaters, it came to light that leading man Tom Cruise had a greater degree of control than originally assumed.
Cruise supposedly had a say in almost every area of the production. He rewrote sections of the script, told Kurtzman how to direct scenes, and even influenced the editing of the film, with sections having to be cut to his specifications. Despite his overarching control, the film still ended up as a jumbled mess.
One can only assume that when you're such a big star, like Cruise, you can demand a certain level of control before even signing onto a project. You command the box office, so you should command the film, for better or worse.