Both Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt are sitting at the top of the food chain when it comes to the entertainment industry. Both of them have incredible roles in their portfolio and it is simply impossible to compare the two. However, despite being some of the most powerful names in the industry, we haven’t seen them in a film together since 1994.
And then, there came a time when Tom Cruise was almost on his way to take away a brilliant role from Brad Pitt. The 2008 movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, saw Brad Pitt play the lead role with David Fincher directing. The movie grossed over $335 million and even bagged 13 Oscar nominations out of which it won three. Now, can we imagine Tom Cruise in Brad Pitt’s place?
Tom Cruise Almost Replaced Brad Pitt
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was adapted from the 1922 short story of the same name, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Brad Pitt was heavily praised for his performance and was even nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role.
Things might have ended up looking a bit different if the stars didn’t align in Pitt’s favor. Not only did Tom Cruise almost replace him for the role of Benjamin Button, but Steven Spielberg was also about to take over the role of the director instead of David Fincher.
Talking to Entertainment Weekly, Spielberg shed a light on this when he was asked about working with actors who bring “their own big machinery to a film.” This prompted Spielberg to talk about the time when he and Cruise almost collaborated on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
“Tom [Cruise] and I were friends. David Geffen introduced us when he made Risky Business, when he was a kid. So Tom and I had been friends for many, many years…personal friends. We had considered working together. Benjamin Button, we had talked about maybe doing together, long before Minority Report. But nothing quite jelled for either of us. So when Minority Report came along, it wasn’t unusual for me to send him the screenplay. But this is the one he said, ‘Let’s do this together.’”
Spielberg and Cruise decided to work together on Minority Report instead. As for Benjamin Button, a long and tedious search finally led to Fincher and Pitt attaching themselves to the film. The fact that the film was optioned by Spielberg in 1991 and ended up releasing in 2008 says a lot about the tedious journey!
Screenwriter Talks about Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg
The first director to ever get linked with the film, Frank Oz, left the project after failing to turn the short story into a full-blown drama. The President of Production at Universal at the time put all his hope into screenwriter Robin Swicord. Swicord’s adaptation ended up working out so perfectly that she got the co-credit for the story.
Swicord talked about how Spielberg was seriously considering doing the film but unfortunately didn’t go through with it. She stated,
“Steven gave the project very serious consideration for about a year. We did some read-throughs with actors, Tom Cruise was somebody that we were very serious about and he came over to Steven’s house for a read-through with several other actors. And then in the course of that year we were also working on Schindler’s List and Jurassic Park, obviously two very different but two very big projects. Steven ultimately decided he was gonna do those two projects back to back so he stepped away, then for a year or two it languished.”
We simply cannot imagine Cruise as Benjamin Button. Maybe everything worked out for the best. What do you think? Could the Cruise and Spielberg duo have managed to make the film even better?
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button can be streamed on Paramount+.
