It’s really not that easy being Tom Cruise.

You would think that being a Hollywood movie star would afford you a certain amount of comfort, ease and happiness in life. You get to drive a nice car, date whomever you please, sleep in late on weekdays, and it’s likely that you own at least one fairly sizable TV.

But when you’re Tom Cruise, you also have to deal with the fact that people might, you know, have grown to kind of hate you.

Mission: Impossible III - slam-dunk blockbuster, right? Big action movie, first big sequel release of the summer, lots of things blowing up and people hurtling off of buildings - so why is so much of the news only about the Tom Cruise Backlash? Witness this report from Roger Friedman at Fox News about a recent test screening of M:I3: 

“There’s a scene where Tom gets beaten up pretty badly,” says a Paramount insider. “And the test audience clapped. It was kind of weird. You’d think Tom’s people wouldn’t have allowed it to stay in the film.”

And another report, from another test screening spy, this time reporting to Defamer: 

“At one point when Tom Cruise is trying to explain to Michelle Monaghan that he has to go away on a ‘business trip’ (i.e. secret mission), she asks him if their relationship is ‘real’ to which he responds ‘of course it’s real.’ Our row snickered with laughter.”

Snickering at and applauding the bitch-slapping of your action hero aren’t really the kinds of audience feedback movie studios tend to look for when they’re nervously contemplating whether their summer tentpole movie is going to open big or, you know, King Kong on them.

And although M:I3 has its fans - including the guy at the Onion who’s giddy with excitement…over the film’s marketing campaign - we’d simply offer the following interesting statistics:

The Users rating (that’s the moviegoing audience, kids, not the silly critics) at Rotten Tomatoes:

• For Mission: Impossible was 82%.
• For Mission: Impossible II it was 75%.
• During the last Tom Cruise Backlash - War of the Worlds - 71%.
• And although there’s no data yet on M:I3, this Tomatometer Predictions forum averages out to a studio-marketing-department suicide-inspiring 67%.

Ouch. We’re not suggesting a trend - we’d have to be a little more dedicated to looking things up and analyzing other things and all that other yecch - but consider this:

For Collateral, in which Cruise plays a ruthless assassin who takes a violent, bloody gunshot wound to the chest and then dies lonely and forgotten on a subway train?

The Rotten Tomatoes Users rating was 93%.