IT’S been an up and down sort of week for Tom Cruise. On the plus side, his trip to Europe got off to a good start when he went to Paris and got himself hitched to a woman almost 20 years his junior.

On the minus, a visit to meet fans in London was spoilt when a prankster behind a red velvet rope squirted water in his eye.

Things got better on Tuesday when the American Film Institute released its list of the 100 greatest lines in cinema history. Bons mots from films Cruise has fronted garnered four places in the list.

But there was salt to this strawberry too. Three of the lines — “You had me at hello” and “Show me the money!”, from Jerry Maguire and “You can’t handle the truth!” from A Few Good Men — were uttered not by the boyish actor but by his co-stars. Even the one entry he did get was a shared credit. A piece of prose termed deathless by the AFI — “I feel the need . . . the need for speed” — from Top Gun, was actually spoken by Cruise and the bit-part player Anthony Edwards.

Still, the vicissitudes of the star’s life were probably welcome news to anxious producers back in Hollywood. Any publicity is good publicity at the best of times in the film business. But when you’re trying to pull out of the worst slump the film industry has known in a decade, the attention is especially welcome.

When Cruise’s new film, an adaptation of War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, opens next week across America it will be carrying with it the nervous hopes of increasingly jittery producers.

Compared with last year, box office receipts have been down every week since February. The last time that year-on-year downturn continued for that long — 17 weeks — was in 1985.

US cinema attendance in May and June so far is down by 11 per cent from a year ago. If that trend continues throughout 2005, the overall number of filmgoers will be down for the third straight year, the first triennial slump since 1962.

Films in which much hope had been invested have not stemmed the decline. Cinderella Man, yet another tale of a boxer (what is it about that sport?) starring Russell Crowe, was a critical success but a box office flop. Last week Batman Begins, the first real summer blockbuster, faded faster than the taunting smile on The Joker’s face.

Industry analysts are puzzling over whether this is just a nasty, prolonged cyclical slump, the result perhaps of some rather undistinguished offerings from the big studios, or whether it marks a sign of the coming apocalypse for moviegoing.

It is true that some of the films have lacked the pulling power of some of last year’s successes, which were led, unpredictably, by Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, one of the highest-grossing films of all time.

But the slump is so deep and so prolonged now that it probably cannot be explained away by creative inadequacy.

The big culprit in the eyes of the film distributors is the DVD. Movie studios have been steadily cutting the time between the date the film opens in theatres and its DVD release date. In some cases this can be as short as eight weeks.

That makes the temptations of waiting to see the latest flick too powerful even for hardened film fans. With DVDs averaging around $18 (£10) — about the price of a pair of cinema tickets — the incentive to wait is overwhelming.

You can sit at home and save yourself another $10 or more by popping your own popcorn in the microwave and opening a bottle of supermarket-bought Coke. The DVD also comes with added effects and can be watched again and again.

Worse for cinemas, in the past few years the home-viewing experience has improved enormously. Home theatre TV systems — with 72-inch widescreens flanked by 16 sets of speakers — have turned many a living room into a more congenial cinema than the local multiplex. High-definition TV has taken off and the price of monster sets has fallen sharply.

All of this is not only bad news for film distributors, but also seems to reflect a broader trend towards the atomisation of entertainment and information consumption. The iPod and internet mean a more customised approach and, with the growing availability of films on demand over the internet and cable or satellite, even the DVD’s days may be numbered. Before long Americans will truly be able to get everything delivered to their living room.

As they ponder that future, film-makers might turn for consolation to some of those other immortal quotes. Number 24 springs to mind: Gloria Swanson’s acid observation about her fading career in Sunset Boulevard: “I am big! It’s the pictures that got small.”

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