Silly season Cruise control
FOUR words that no journalist expected to be writing this year: a Tom Cruise comeback. Talk about mission impossible.
Seven years ago Cruise jumped the couch (on the Oprah Winfrey show) and then jumped the shark, with a string of flops that started with Mission: Impossible III and plummeted to Knight and Day.
Then, just before Christmas, Cruise hung by his hands from a plate glass window 60 storeys above Dubai and got born again - or should we say, Bourne Again. Confounding predictions, the fourth Mission: Impossible sold 1.3 million tickets in Australian cinemas during the summer break, and is still going strong this weekend.
It has already made $5 million more than its predecessor in 2006, and is on its way to matching the $22 million earned by its inspiration, The Bourne Ultimatum.
Cruise's comeback was one of several surprises in the way Australians entertained themselves during the lazy, hazy, crazy days of late December and early January.
Faced with the dullest TV silly season in decades, we mobbed the multiplexes. In an average week during the year, Australians spend $17 million on cinema tickets. In the week between Christmas and New Year, we spent $35 million.
But while summer is supposed to be all about holidaying schoolies, it became apparent the adult audience is a force to be reckoned with.
The Iron Lady, profiling a politician who was dominating and dividing Britain years before the average cinemagoer was even born, has so far sold 400,000 tickets.
The most disappointed filmmaker this season would be Australia's George Miller. Showing in 463 cinemas, his Happy Feet 2 could only average $5200 per screen in its first week, and is likely to leave cinemas with less than $10 million. Its predecessor made $31 million.
When they weren't at the flicks, the kids were using the cash that came in the card from grandma to buy the first album by Reece Mastin, last year's winner of the TV talent quest The X-Factor.
The under-15s also downloaded Mastin's single Good Night, in which he declares: ''I'm gonna live it up tonight, forgetting those who dim my light.'' That activity would, of course, need to be alcohol-free, since Mastin is just 17.
The adult musical choice was Michael Buble's album Christmas, which sold 300,000 copies in the five weeks leading up to the day itself, then dropped off the chart.
The teens who weren't playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 on their consoles were reading the latest in Jeff Kinney's series of comic novels about the Diary of a Wimpy Kid, while their parents tried not to get sand in Walter Isaacson's heavy hardback about the life and death of Apple pioneer Steve Jobs. Once in a while, Australians did flick on the box, but that was mainly to glance at the cricket and the news and a few minutes of The Big Bang Theory, which is now shown on three channe! ls and i s to this decade what The Simpsons was to the '90s.
Viewers setting off on holidays set their devices to record the final episodes of the US reality series Survivor, the Doctor Who Christmas special, and the sci-fi series Terra Nova, which is filmed in Queensland and features many familiar faces from old Underbelly episodes.
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