CRUISE CONTROL : Mr. Phelps’ Trickiest Mission

Switching release dates on high-profile pictures may not seem like a big deal to the average moviegoer. But when the movie’s star and producer is Tom Cruise and the film is based on a popular franchise like “Mission: Impossible,” a switch can cause more headaches than anyone anticipated.

Independently published release schedules had listed the film as coming out Dec. 8, which would have made it Paramount’s big Christmas action movie, although the studio and the film’s producers say that a 1995 release was never planned. A release date of June 28, 1996, was announced recently.

In any case, the move triggered more than the usual jockeying by competing studios to grab Dec. 8 for their Christmas pictures. And it spawned rumors by competitors, as well as a few Paramount sources, saying that “Mission: Impossible” was in trouble.

Some insiders claimed that shooting had been bogged down by a stalemate over creative differences between Cruise and “Mission: Impossible” director Brian De Palma.

Cruise’s producing partner, Paula Wagner, and Paramount concede that the film ran into a snag while shooting in Prague because authorities there tried to charge them five times the amount previously agreed upon. That dispute was resolved and, they insist, was the only cause for any delay in production. They were offended that competitors would stoop to spreading rumors about a conflict between the star and director.

W hat’s puzzling Paramount and Wagner is how the Dec. 8 date ever surfaced for the picture in the first place. They say they always saw it as a Memorial Day ’96 release at the earliest and point to the studio’s release schedules handed out previously that simply said the picture was “Coming” and “Coming Soon.” Cruise, Paramount sources insist, always wanted the ’96 date and that is why the picture is headed for that release.

Although officials with Exhibitor Relations, which publishes an updated release schedule every month, declined comment, several studio competitors say that they and the box-office tracking firm were told by Paramount of the holiday release date. They say it is significant because there are 15 to 16 potential heavy hitters coming out in December and all were bunched up for Dec. 15 and 22 releases.

“Everybody looked at Dec. 8 and saw ‘Mission: Impossible’ on the charts and ran for shelter,” says one 20th Century Fox source. “They saw that action movie and that big star and said ‘Forget it. I’m not putting my picture up against that.’ ”

The result, says a Warner Bros. source, “is that you end up with a bottleneck on the other dates.” The danger comes into play because the opening of a picture is critical to a movie’s box-office life. “If it gets lost in the shuffle, you’re dead,” adds the Fox source.

“And if you don’t believe it, look at how quickly Warners moved ‘Heat’ [starring Al Pacino and Robert De Niro] to the Dec. 8 date once ‘Mission: Impossible’ was out of there,” the source noted. “The jockeying has just begun.”*