Risky Business: Tom Cruise's Flop Era with What Went Wrong | 69
The Big Flop
Wondery
4.6 • 884 Ratings
🗓️ 6 January 2025
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For over a decade, Tom Cruise was Hollywood's most bankable star, ruling Tinseltown with a million-dollar grin and a carefully crafted image. But when ditching his publicist led to couch-jumping antics, Scientology scandals, and box office bombs, La La Land’s Top Gun found himself in a tailspin that even Ethan Hunt couldn't escape.
Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer from What Went Wrong join Misha to jump off the couch and into the lowest point of Tom Cruise’s career.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You know what's even better than listening to the big flop? |
| 0:03.6 | Listening to the big flop without any ads. |
| 0:06.7 | With Wondery Plus, you can enjoy the floppiest of flops, completely uninterrupted. |
| 0:12.0 | It's like having a front row seat to the world's biggest train wrecks. |
| 0:15.7 | Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or in Apple Podcasts and upgrade your listening experience today. |
| 0:31.6 | Tom Cruise, the biggest movie star in the world, is backstage getting ready to do a rare TV appearance. |
| 0:39.4 | He's going to be interviewed by Oprah. |
| 0:42.9 | The studio audience is going absolutely insane, and Tom is loving it. |
| 0:49.9 | The crowd is on their feet, jumping up and down, screaming their heads off, and Tom hasn't even |
| 0:56.5 | gotten on stage yet. Usually, Tom doesn't do too many interviews. He doesn't like getting |
| 1:03.1 | questions about his personal life, especially since he started getting so much flack about |
| 1:09.1 | Scientology. But he's got a new movie to promote, |
| 1:12.6 | and he's in a brand new relationship |
| 1:14.6 | that he's just dying to talk about. |
| 1:17.2 | So today, he's going to try a new strategy. |
| 1:22.4 | Tom is getting pumped up backstage. |
| 1:25.9 | He's feeding off the crowd's energy and pumping his fists. Tom is |
| 1:30.2 | jumping up and down to amp himself up even more. He's got more energy than he knows what to do with. |
| 1:36.1 | He's ready to go. Then the shouting dies down. Oprah's managed to calm the crowd, and that means |
| 1:43.7 | it's time for Tom to make his entrance. |
| 1:46.9 | Tom starts sprinting out, time to get out on stage on that couch next to Oprah. Today, he's going to |
| 1:53.8 | show the world a new side of Tom Cruise. What Tom doesn't know is that getting on that |
... |
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