Tropic Thunder
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While Robert Downey Jr. received the bulk of the publicity for Tropic Thunder, his performance didn't stand out the most for many viewers.

Instead, Tom Cruise's character of Les Grossman was responsible for a majority of the best Tropic Thunder quotes.

That's why we were so excited to hear the actor tell E!'s Marc Malkin that there will be more Grossman to come.

"I’ve talked about doing different videos with the character," Cruise said. "I’ve started working with Ben [Stiller] on it, and we’ve kind of talked about different things to do. We were gonna do some in our free time, but we haven’t found the free time…yet."

Moreover, Cruie won't rule out a full-length film centered on this hilarious studio head:

"He’s a fun character. I gotta talk to Ben, but there could be more to do with that guy."

Tropic Thunder came out on DVD this week.

While the hilarious movie itself is likely enough to place it on many people's Netflix queue, here's a look at an extra from the DVD. It focuses on the gusty performance of Jay Baruchel...

Tropic Thunder DVD Clip

They're the two biggest comedies of the summer. One was focused on pot smoking, the other on a pretend war.

Now, the Reel Movie News staff would like to know which movie readers found funnier: Pineapple Express or Tropic Thunder?

Vote now:

A slew of celebrities took to the red carpet for last night's world premiere of Tropic Thunder.

Below, we've included thumbnails of a few of the movie's stars at the event. Click on them for larger versions...

Ben Stiller wrote, directed, produced and starred in Tropic Thunder. Did the star mind all the work?

He was recently asked about it by MoviesOnline. Here's Stiller's reply:

The hardest scene for me in the movie was the scene after the action sequence in the beginning. Strangely, like the scene in the movie, it doesn’t really stand out as looking that complicated, but just shooting the movie crew and shooting the reveal of the movie set.

I think it was the combination of having these fake arms on and my hands were tied behind my back and I was playing an actor who was trying to tell the director to cut and the director was saying “Don’t cut” but I was the director in real life.

It was very confusing and there was a lot going on and there were so many people in the scene. The action stuff was so specific and we’d spent so many months prepping it with storyboards and pre-viz and all that stuff gets broken down because it has to.

Ben Stiller takes on the role of Tugg Speedman in Tropic Thunder.

But then when we got to this scene where we had to shoot a movie set itself, that was really the most complicated, strangely, and most frustrating. I was really surprised at how hard that was. In general, the action stuff to me was really fun to do because you can actually take time with it and it’s very painstaking, but you get to prep every single shot and you do it one shot at a time. While the other stuff that’s more free form, you kind of have to figure it out as you go along.

When you’ve got five or six actors in every scene too, there’s a lot of coverage with the camera. You’ve got to shoot everybody. We had a really good time though and we had really good time to prepare the movie. I had six months or so.

And then I got out there for a couple of weeks with the actors rehearsing with the cameraman and we shot angles and did a lot of pre-work on those scenes so that when we got out to shooting them we knew basically how we were approaching it, because I felt like I needed to do that if I was going to be acting in the scenes.

Tropic Thunder is the next major studio movie to challenge The Dark Knight for box office supremacy.

Can this Ben Stiller-directed comedy succeed where so many others have failed? We'll find out this week.

In the meantime, click on the following Tropic Thunder thumbnails for larger photos from the film...

Tropic Thunder comes out on August 13.

What do critics have to say about this Ben Stiller-directed comedy? We asked a few for their opinion...

- A smart-alecky sendup of Hollywood in general and action films in particular, Tropic Thunder undeniably provokes quite a few laughs, but of the most hollow kind... -- Variety

- The self-aggrandizing humor becomes tiresome midway through...but the ending is spectacular and relentless. It would be hard for even the most cynical to avoid a hefty chuckle or two by the time the credits roll... -- ReelzChannel

- A broad action comedy that manages to mix subtlety with satire... -- Hollywood Reporter

- Robert Downey, Jr.'s performance is nearly on par with what Heath Ledger did as the Joker... -- Cinema Blend

Tropic Thunder actor Brandon T. Jackson knows that co-star Robert Downey Jr. might receive some criticism from his unusual role in the comedy. But Jackson has a message to those that have a problem with the caucasian Downey painting his face black for most of the movie.

"To be honest, he played a black dude better than anybody I've seen!" Jackson told People Magazine about Downey's performance in the Ben Stiller-directed film.

Yes, that's Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder.

Jackson did admit to having initial hesitations about Downey's part. In the movie, Downey portrays Kirk Lazarus, an Academy Award-winning actor that's cast in the most expensive Vietnam war film ever.

However, Lazarus's character, Sgt. Osiris, was originally written as an African-American. So Lazarus dyes his skin to play the role.

"When I first read the script, I was like: What? Black face? But when I saw him [act] he, like, became a black man," Jackson said. ""It was weird on the set because he would keep going with the character. He's a method actor."

A new trailer for Tropic Thunder has been released online. It's a great mockumentary called "Rain of Madness" that explores what happened during the shooting of the movie within the movie...

Tropic Thunder comes on August 15.

In the Ben Stiller-directed comedy, Robert Downey Jr. sports black face. If that's not enough to inspire you to see the comedy, perhaps the following trailer will: