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Mission: Impossible III may have raked in over $300 million overall so far (with 60 percent of that coming at the foreign box office), but its disappointing™ $47 million domestic opening certainly made Hollywood wonder if the combination of Tom Cruise's massive compensation and his audience-alienating, suspiciously-impregnating (hey, anyone seen that Suri kid yet? Just askin', because Shiloh's already has a nice little modeling career.), psychiatrist-flaying antics might not be great for the Tom Cruise Industry. In fact, according to some people who wish to remain anonymous because they fear the actor will personally—personally!—grind them into a fine powder beneath the heels of his best couch-stomping boots, Cruise needs a time-out to detoxify from a severe case of the "cooties." Reports Kim Masters at Slate:

If you're Cruise's agents at CAA, you need to do more than find a home for Cruise's production company. You need to find the right project for Cruise the actor. One marketing executive speaks for many in saying, "He needs to go away." The idea is that Cruise should stay out of sight for at least a year, allowing time to get over what one prominent agent calls "the cootie factor."

Apparently Cruise does not grasp the cootie factor and has no plans to take a break. And the agent says it would be very hard for his reps, at this delicate moment, to explain the situation to him. "He's in a zone that he's never been in and it's their job to make sure he feels the positive light," he says. Another source close to the star agrees. "You've got to be very careful in conversations with him," he says. "Tom is not ever going to face facts." [...]

How does anyone expect Cruise to "face facts" when he's been so comfortably cocooned in an impermeable, reality-resistant bubble of his own devising? No nasty thing the suppressive media might write about him can possibly replace the ecstatic feeling accompanying the happiest memory of his life, when Cruise woke up on the Monday following M:i:III's opening weekend and first saw the custom-printed copy of Variety celebrating the movie's unprecedented, $61 billion worldwide gross sitting on his breakfast tray.