Tom Cruise to run UA

One day your ass gets canned by Sumner Redstone, the next you're running a legendary Hollywood studio. Such are the circumstances in which Tom Cruise and producing partner Paula Wagner find themselves, according to AP.

After months of rumors about hedge funds and other nefarious ways of financing future Cruise films, he now gets the keys to United Artists, the studio founded by Hollywood royalty Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford. So is it irony or coincidence that a studio founded by actors so they would have creative control -- and financial renumeration to go along with it -- turns to another actor who craves both said control and cash in the face of a studio system that knocked him on his can? Guess Paramount going into the dumper would put it into the irony category, but it's a bit early for that, don't you think?

Meanwhile, AP reports that the UA deal allows Cruise to make movies for other studios, so it won't jeopardize films already greenlighted that involve the mega-star.

So now that T.C. has his own real movie studio, here's my pitch: "Pulp Prophet," in which a young writer of science fiction for dimestore magazines decides to ... start his own religion and really start raking in the green. With T.C. as L. Ron, of course.

More scuttlebutt: From Defamer -- Breaking: Tom Cruise To Redstone: 'F You, I'll Get My Own Damn Studio' (featuring the complete press release).