Paramount Pictures and Imax to preview movie in large format before wide release.

LONDON – U.K. previews of Tom Cruise starrer Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol will be on Imax screens almost a week ahead of its wide rollout across British screens.

Imax and Paramount Pictures said the plan would be the first time a U.K. movie has been released early in Imax theaters.

The aim from both is to reinforce the “event nature” of the movie, some of which director Brad Bird shot scenes for using Imax cameras.

One of them sees Cruise scaling part of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa Tower in Dubai, before performing a dizzying stunt by running down part of it attached to a fire hose.

Bird’s movie sees Cruise star alongside Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg and Paula Patton.

The picture will play big in Imax in the U.K. from Dec. 21 this year before going wide from Dec. 26 everywhere.

Imax also announced it is teaming with U.K. exhibition giant Cineworld Group for a revenue sharing agreement to install three new digital IMAX® theater systems in England and Scotland.

The systems will be installed in existing multiplexes in Edinburgh, Sheffield and Nottingham.

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Brad Bird, who has two Oscars for his Pixar films, is on a mission to make his first live-action blockbuster but, on a recent morning, as he regaled some journalists with behind-the-scenes tales of Hollywood, there was really only one word to describe his raconteur style: animated.

Waving his arms, hunching over and making high-decibel sound effects, the writer-director was a one-man cartoon as he unspooled a story about working on the “Ratatouille” recording sessions with Peter O’Toole. It was a good story but one suspects Bird will walk away from his new project, “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” with far more exotic memories.

The fourth film in the “Mission” franchise, with Tom Cruise back as super-spy Ethan Hunt, opens everywhere on Dec. 21 and, five days before that, it will get a special early run at IMAX and select prestige theaters. It was Bird who pushed hard for that early giant-screen plan — he is, quite literally, thinking big for this key career moment. But don’t think for a minute that he’s sour on his cartoon past.

“I’m not like some animation directors and like, ‘Thank God I’m out of animation and sitting at the adult’s table, I’m tired of sitting at the kid’s table,’” Bird said with a mock, raspy anger. “I have other ideas I’d love to do in animation. My ideal career from here would be to jump back and forth and let the project dictate what medium I work in. To me it’s all storytelling.”

The story this time starts in Russia where the Kremlin is bombed and the blame is put on Hunt and his three IMF teammates (portrayed by Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg and Paula Patton), who must embark on a perilous globetrotting mission to get to the true villains. Shooting a Paramount Pictures tentpole in Dubai; Prague, Czech Republic; Moscow; Mumbai, India; and Vancouver, Canada, shows how much ground Bird has covered since his drawing-table days. The 54-year-old Montana native started his career as an animator with early credits like “Animalympics” in 1980 (produced, by the way, by “Tron” writer-director Steven Lisberger) and Disney’s “The Fox and the Hound” a year later.
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Tom Cruise risked life and limb filming action sequences at the top of the world’s tallest building for “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol,” but he said that wasn’t any scarier than the singing required for his first musical, the just-wrapped “Rock of Ages.”

“They all have their risks,” Cruise said with a laugh of playing rocker Stacee Jaxx in Adam Shankman’s adaptation of the Tony-winning 2006 musical, which featured songs by jukebox heroes such as Bon Jovi, Styx, Journey and Pat Benatar. Among the tunes Cruise belts out in the film: “Pour Some Sugar on Me.”

Shankman is coming off the foot-tapping success of “Hairspray,” while Cruise, inspired by his dance-loving wife, Katie Holmes, is taking a true genre gamble even as he celebrates the 30th anniversary of his first screen appearances (“Endless Love” and “Taps” both came out in 1981). The action star said Holmes’ influence is also why he added some memorable dance-floor moves to his Hollywood agent performance in “Tropic Thunder.”
“I had started dancing because I was inspired by my wife. She kept saying, ‘You’ve got to do a musical sometime,’ ” Cruise said. “Kate’s a dancer, so she would say, ‘Let’s go to dance class,’ and she would take us and that’s how I kind of came up with the idea of Les Grossman doing hip-hop. And then to take it to this level with this? It was really fun.”

Shankman has said Cruise is a natural and has music in his genes thanks to an opera singer in his family tree. The filmmaker has shown a flair for the unexpected: Shankman pulled a signature performance from John Travolta in his gender-flipped role in “Hairspray.” So perhaps “Rock of Ages” will be one of Cruise’s acclaimed “experiment” roles, such as in “Magnolia,” “Collateral” or the aforementioned “Tropic Thunder” — even if the sight of the bare-chested, long-maned Cruise as Jaxx has already been jeered across the Internet.

The actor said he’s just pumped to be working with Shankman.

“He’s on fire,” Cruise said. “What he accomplished with ‘Hairspray’ was amazing. My daughter has seen it 15 times and our whole family has watched it over and over and it’s just enormously entertaining. To be able to hold that tone throughout is really something.”

The cast of “Rock of Ages” also includes Diego Boneta, Julianne Hough, Russell Brand, Alec Baldwin, Mary J. Blige and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and much of the heavy lifting for the shoot was done in South Florida. Cruise said his singing and dancing work there was a different challenge than his “Mission: Impossible” job swinging out windows atop the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, but in some ways more stressful.

“I was working on it when I was finishing ‘Mission’ and I was singing five hours a day and I was dancing five hours a day,” Cruise said. “Adam said, ‘Look, we’re going to have a lot of fun,’ and we really did…. I did six months preparing for the movie, and all my stunt training and all of those years doing that, it helped me with the choreography.”

“Rock of Ages” hits theaters in June.

Source: LA Times

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Hey guys, I’ve uploaded some Lions for Lambs imagery: HQ Stills, Caps, Set pictures and Posters. Enjoy!

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