It's a good thing Tom Cruise is getting rave reviews for his portrayal of a greedy Jewish studio boss in Tropic Thunder, because every other aspect of his life is slowly going to hell.

The recent news that Paula Wagner, his producing partner at United Artists and the wife of Cruise's recently departed agent Rick Nicita, is leaving her post as chief executive to produce projects independently certainly doesn't help matters.

Cruise and Wagner teamed up at UA in 2006 with a $500 million credit line from Merrill Lynch and the auspices of parent company MGM to greenlight any movie with a budget of up to $60 million, no questions asked. The end result? Lions For Lambs, which cost $35 million and grossed $15 million, and Valkyrie, the odd-sounding Nazi war movie which no one can decide when to release.

The news caps an embarrassing week for the actor, who despite what Paramount chair Sumner Redstone might think, is definitely not a Scientologist. Paramount deemed Cruise too old and too costly to star in the dependably bankable Mission Impossible 4—a fact which caused Cruise to throw a tantrum and run out of a meeting. He was also recently replaced by Angelina Jolie as the star of Columbia's upcoming spy flick Edwin A. Salt. Two weeks ago, Nicita, who had worked with Cruise at CAA, departed the agency to go work at the production company Morgan Creek. On Tuesday, UA's executive VP of production Jeff Kleeman left after just 11 months on the job, which pretty much leaves Cruise and some assistants to right the ship.

Over at Deadline Hollywood, Nikki Finke attributes Wagner's disastrous tenure to her inability to greenlight movies fast enough to appease investors. "I'm told specified start dates and release dates haven't been met, so UA could lose a goodly portion of that [Merrill Lynch's $500 million] credit line," she writes. Per a source: The only future for UA was "if Paula calls it a day, or the company implodes on its own, or a gun is put to Wagner's head by financiers and she greenlights things and then trusts in luck..."

Don't feel too bad for Wagner, though: she just bought a ninth-floor loft in Tribeca with Nicita for $4.5 million. We can think of worse places to settle into after exiting a total clusterfuck.

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