Ben Child
theguardian.com, Friday 7 February 2014 09.24 GMT


Billion dollar baby … Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol was Tom Cruise's highest-grossing film of all time. Photograph: Masatoshi Okauchi/Rex Features

A screenwriter who claims his script was stolen by the makers of action blockbuster Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol has sued star and producer Tom Cruise for $1bn (£614m).

Timothy Patrick McLanahan claims in his suit that Cruise and studio Paramount used his 1998 screenplay for an unfilmed movie titled Head On as the basis for the 2011 film. He is asking for all proceeds from Ghost Protocol, which made $694m at the global box office, to be paid to him. The court papers were sourced by gossip site Radar Online.

The suit, which was filed at the US district court in Los Angeles, claims McLanahan sent his screenplay to Hollywood agency William Morris in 1998, but was told it was of no use to them. The screenwriter argues William Morris then sent the script on, without his permission, to the CAA agency, Cruise's agent, Rick Nicita, and the actor's producer partner, Paula Wagner. More than a decade later, McLanahan saw Ghost Protocol and "immediately recognised that the scripts for this movie had been illegally written and produced from Head On's 1998 copyright".

Cruise's lawyer, Bert Fields, has dismissed the lawsuit. "Tom Cruise has never stolen anything from anyone," he told AFP. "This bizarre lawsuit against 13 people will be quickly dismissed by the court."

The $1bn figure is the total of all Ghost Protocol's box-office receipts, plus all profits from DVD and Blu-ray sales and other rental and subscription proceeds. The fourth movie in the Mission: Impossible series stands as Cruise's highest-grossing film of all time and was successful enough to spawn plans for a fifth instalment in 2015.

The Guardian

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If he can waste money on Scientology, he can waste money on this.

Well the film, despite Cruise, was great. This is greater