Tom Cruise Leads United Artists, But Where?

After Sumner Redstone, owner of Paramount, said he fired Tom Cruise last year and Cruise's people claimed the parting was mutual, some too soon predicted the beginning of the end for Cruise's career. As the very wealthy and famous are know to do however, Cruise has ended on his feet and now holds control, along with his business partner, Paula Wagner, of the historic studio called United Artists.

United Artists was famously founded by D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks in 1920. A more famous set of stockholders has never existed, before or since.

The future test for Cruise will be the skill with which he exercises his new found power. Will United Artists produce films to be proud of, or will Cruise's devotion to Scientology lead him to generate a set of horrid efforts to reproduce the vast fiction and non-fiction drivel of Scientology's founding Commodore, the dreaded L. Ron Hubbard (photo)? As anyone who has paid to see John Travolta's version of Hubbard's sci-fi nonsense, "Battlefield Earth" can testify, the results can be awful.