Variety, the entertainment industry bible, said audiences had grown "weary of Tom Cruise's pervasive media presence, from his chair-hopping antics on the Oprah show to his ongoing advocacy for Scientology". The New York Times wondered "if the real mission in his newest film isn't the search for the damsel in distress or the hunt for the supervillain, but the resurrection of a screen attraction who has, of late, seemed a bit of a freak".

Screenwriter and director Nora Ephron went even further, naming Cruise "the new Michael Jackson, a weirdo, a poster-boy for career immolation, a bizarre case of arrested development".

This might make sense if M: I 3 had been a flop, but the film took in $120m at the worldwide box office, including $47m in the US. Reviews were pretty good too.

The problem is with public perceptions of Cruise.

He has certainly made a spectacle of himself in the past year, with his overdramatised courtship of Katie Holmes, up to the birth of their daughter last month.

His adherence to Scientology alienated a usually fawning media, which found itself aghast at his dismissals of psychiatry, including a very personal attack on Brooke Shields, who publicly discussed her postpartum depression.

It seems reasonable, then, to conclude that entertainment writers had it in for him. USA Today even commissioned a Gallup poll to gauge opinion of Cruise, as though he were a politician. (His approval was 35% . . . a tad higher than George Bush's . . . down 23 points on last year. ) In response, Cruise's powerful Hollywood friends expressed their support. "If you do $118m in a three-day period around the world, you're to be congratulated, " Paramount chairman Brad Grey said.

The moguls have reason to be unnerved. Male leads are thin on the ground these days, especially ones who can 'open' a big-budget film. Cruise has been a reliable member of the A-list for a long time, and they all want to keep him there. New York Times critic Manohla Dargis had perhaps the canniest piece of advice. "Once upon a Hollywood time, " she wrote, "the studios carefully protected their stars from the press and the public.

Now the impossible mission, it seems, is protecting them from themselves."