May 04, 2025 04:38 PM IST
The scene of Tom Cruise walking through an empty Times Square in the 2001 release Vanilla Sky is still one of the most expensive shots of cinema history.
Tom Cruise is one of the biggest stars in the world. In 2001, he was already one of the leading stars in Hollywood when his film Vanilla Sky was released. The film was met with mixed reactions, but over the years audiences have grown to love the film’s themes. Did you know, the film contains one of the most expensive shots in cinema history when the makers spent more than $1 million for a scene of Tom Cruise walking through an empty Times Square? (Also read: Tom Cruise, 62, shares what he eats for breakfast before jumping off planes, buildings, mountains for Mission Impossible)
The Vanilla Sky scene
In the scene, which is a dream sequence featuring Tom Cruise, his character is seen walking down an empty Times Square crossing and connecting with himself all over again. Now, Times Square is one of the busiest places in the world and it was practically impossible to clear it out at any part of the day.
So, to film the sequence, the production team had to reportedly secure a permit to shut down Times Square for three hours on a Sunday morning. This cost over $1 million. As per Screen Rant, the makers paid $1 million to use blockades in order to avoid any tourists and traffic from coming into the scene for that allotted time.
‘How can we project his psyche onto these buildings?’
The scene got an added degree of relevance during the pandemic in 2020, when the Times Square was seen empty for the first time in years. Reflecting on this, director Cameron Crowe had told Vulture in an interview in 2020, “We were told so often when it happened, ‘Take a good look. This will never happen again.’ We heard that a lot. ‘This is only gonna happen once, so you better do it right.’ Which was kind of the theme of getting that shot together. It’s extremely eerie. And what’s super eerie is that all of the video [advertising] that’s part of Times Square now — it wasn’t to that extent at all when we shot the movie. Our original thought was, ‘How can we project his psyche onto these buildings?’ And we did some early CGI stuff to [project] things onto the buildings, so he’s lost in this kind of Cuisinart of his thoughts and feelings. But when I saw Times Square emptied out [in 2020], it was like — his psyche stuff is part of the culture now. There are ads on all of the buildings, and they have a visual conversation with other stuff on other buildings. And now, nobody is there. It’s extremely eerie. It looked very strangely, oddly familiar.”
Vanilla Sky also starred Penelope Cruz and Cameron Diaz. It grossed over $203 million worldwide at the box office during its time of release.
