It's called Schadenfraude

So it looks that Mission Impossible 3 did not do that well at the box office. I, for one, couldn't be happier. They expected 65 million dollars and they got about 48. Don't all start crying for Paramount just yet. They are going to make a zillion dollars in the foreign run of the movie. Yet everybody knows it: people are sick of Tom Cruise and his creepy dianetical antics.
I have never liked the guy. Ever. To me, he is the human version of the famous Gertrude Stein dictum about Oakland: there is no there there. At least, that's how I used to feel about Cruise when he was carefully and successfully controlled by his publicist of yore (wisely, she barely let him open his yap). Now that he has unleashed himself upon the world, we find that the there that is there is rather creepy in an embarassing, cringe-inducing way. And who wants to go to the movies to see that?
The only times when Cruise has been good is when he plays self-involved, narcissistic assholes, like in Magnolia, a brilliant piece of casting by PT Anderson, and like in Collateral by Michael Mann, where he also plays a smug bastard. Every other performance of his is always marked by intense straining and unconvincing fakery of the most basic human emotions.
As the article in the NYT points out, because of his moronic and hostile pronouncements on subjects he has no clue about, such as psychiatry and motherhood, this creep has managed to alienate a huge chunk of his fan base, who used to be women. The one thing the guy had going for him were his good looks. He had a great smile and a wholesome cuteness. He had baby fat and still looked good. But when he acts like an envoy from a sect of evil aliens he just doesn't look that hot. He just seems creepy. This is compounded by the fact that Katie Holmes seems to have been Stepfordized into submission, that nobody has seen the purported Suri baby, and that the overexposure has become too much to bear, even for our insatiable culture of oglers.
If you haven't noticed, I hate his guts and the less we see and hear of him, the better.