Tradecraft: Knight And Day Fox's Top 2010 Earner

When it opened softly in the US last summer, Knight and Day was immediately written off as a failure in the American press—and Tom Cruise's career publicly pronounced dead.  Despite that stigma, the film has already earned some vindication by going on to gross an impressive $262 million worldwide, putting it ahead of celebrated summer hits, like Grown Ups.  Now, there's even further vindication for Knight and Day.  According to Deadline, it's turned out to be 20th Century Fox's highest grossing film of 2010.  (Avatar technically earned the studio more money this year, but it was a 2009 release.)  Granted, it hasn't been a great year for Fox, but $262 million is nothing to scoff at.  It's clear that Cruise and Cameron Diaz are certainly still forces to be reckoned with at the international box office, and that rumors of Crusie's career's demise proved to be greatly exaggerated.  I'm glad for this film's vindication, because I found it to be a very entertaining spy spoof.  Knight and Day came out on DVD and Blu-ray/DVD combo last week.

Read my review of the Knight and Day Blu-ray here.

Tradecraft: Knight And Day Vindicated

After being branded such a flop that it warranted a radical rethinking for the new Mission: Impossible movie (the positive upshot of which is that we might finally end up with more of a team movie instead of a star vehicle!), it turns out (as I've contended before) that the Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz spy parody Knight and Day (review here) didn't do so badly after all.  In a Deadline story about another, unrelated Cruise project, Mike Fleming reports:

[It's] worth nothing that by the time Knight and Day completes its run in Japan, the film will wind up grossing better than $264 million worldwide. Because the picture did only around $69 million domestic, Cruise and Cameron Diaz got a pretty good drubbing. But the number is comparable to films like the Adam Sandler comedy Grown Ups, which was considered a summer hit. That film had a strong opening weekend and did most of its business domestic, but  Knight and Day did better overseas. That overseas launch came later because of the World Cup.

Good to set the record straight, anyway. As previously reported, Knight and Day (which was a lot of fun!) comes out on DVD and Blu-ray on November 30.