Tom Cruise Will Rock The IMAX

Have you been hoping against hope that one day you'd get to see Tom Cruise singing 80s hair metal on an IMAX screen?  No, me neither.  But we will be getting the chance to do that anyway, since Rock of Ages will now be getting a limited engagement at IMAX theaters when it's released on June 15, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Based on the Broadway musical whose score completely consists of 80s rock music, Rock of Ages takes place at LA's The Bourbon, a Sunset Strip nightclub facing foreclosure thanks to angry religious group led by Catherine Zeta-Jones (in the show, it was a German developer who wanted to tear it down to build a strip mall).  So the club's owners, played by Alec Baldwin and Russell Brand, recruit Cruise's egomaniac rocker Stacee Jaxx, lead singer of the band Arsenal, to play their final concert at The Bourbon to try and save the club.  And lunacy ensues.

This will be Cruise's first time singing onscreen (besides that scene from Top Gun), and his songs in the movie, which Rock of Ages music producer Adam Anders swears have not been auto-tuned, will include Guns N' Roses' "Paradise City", Bon Jovi's "Wanted: Dead or Alive", and Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar on Me".   You can hear a little of his Bon Jovi in the latest trailer:

IMAX or not, I am looking forward to this.  The Broadway version was crazy fun (and being a child of the 80s, the music could do no wrong by me), and director Adam Shankman did a great job with the movie version of Hairspray a few years ago, so he's definitely the right guy to take on Rock of Ages.

Whether or not I bring along the little pen-light lighter they gave us at the show to the movie remains to be seen.