Tom Cruise's breakup with Paramount Pictures, announced by Paramount's parent Viacom in a newspaper interview, is especially bitter, even by Hollywood standards.

It follows a string of recent incidents featuring the actor's erratic behavior and religious proselytising, and a dimming of his star power.

Viacom's chief Sumner Redstone, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal published online late Tuesday, said Paramount was cutting loose Cruise (44) after a 14-year relationship.

Redstone (83), one of the entertainment industry's richest and most influential men, only three months ago was seen smiling alongside Cruise at the premiere of 'Mission: Impossible III'.

"It's nothing to do with his acting ability, he's a terrific actor," Redstone told The Wall Street Journal. "But we don't think that someone who effectuates creative suicide and costs the company revenue should be on the lot."

He added: "His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount."

The latest in the star's 'Mission: Impossible' series by Hollywood terms was a flop, earning $113-million domestically on a budget of some $150-million. The film eventually earned $259-million internationally.

Redstone told the New York business newspaper that Cruise's antics had cost the movie up to $150-million in ticket sales.

That was decidedly a bad bottom-line review for a studio which has seen the 'Top Gun' and 'Days of Thunder' star's films generate $2.5-billion worldwide.

Cruise has grabbed headlines in recent years for increasingly eccentric behavior, such as jumping on a couch during a guest stint on talkshow queen Oprah Winfrey's shows in May 2005 as he declared his love for actress Katie Holmes.

Hollywood observer Lew Harris, editorial director of Movies.com, said on Wednesday that Paramount "could have just quietly not renewed" the contract with Cruise/Wagner Productions, which has been on the Paramount lot since 1992.

"But there's some distancing, they just want to push this guy away," Harris told AFP.

Cruise/Wagner Productions enjoyed an especially lucrative deal with Paramount: the star had up to $10-million to develop movie projects, and earned 20 percent of movie box-office revenue as well as a large percentage of DVD sales, according to the Journal.

The Cruise camp told a different tale of the breakup: Partner and former agent Paula Wagner has told reporters that Cruise/Wagner Productions plans to set up an independent business using money from two top hedge funds.

"It's a War of the Words" blared a banner headline on Wednesday's Variety, the leading Hollywood trade publication, with the front page featuring a photo of Cruise's infamous couch-jumping stint on the Oprah show.

The Oprah display, coming on the heels of his divorce with actress Nichole Kidman, was intended to dispel doubts that Cruise's courtship of Holmes was a mere publicity stunt.

The affair, however, was red meat for late-night television comedians, lampooned endlessly on comedy shows, and even criticised in The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Yet it was Cruise's constant promotion of the Church of Scientology, a faith founded by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard that many consider a cult, that finally convinced the studio executives to give him the thumbs down, observers say.

Harris said that Cruise's problems date back to when he was promoting the 2005 Steven Spielberg film 'War of the Worlds'.

"It was well-known that Spielberg was not happy about the fact that Cruise used his junkets from 'War of the Worlds' to promote his religious beliefs," said Harris. "You anger Spielberg, there's a domino effect, he's paying the price of this."

"The Scientology thing spooked a lot of people too," he added.

Paramount, which in February finalised its $1.6-billion purchase of rival DreamWorks SKG, could not afford to lose money on Cruise, said Harris.

Cruise's fall from grace contrasts sharply with that of actor Mel Gibson, who launched into an anti-Semitic diatribe when he was pulled over by police for drunk driving in late July.

Gibson lost a contract with the ABC television network to produce a series about the Holocaust, but Disney — a particularly scandal-adverse studio — is still planning to distribute Gibson's next film, 'Apocalypto'.

"There were polls that showed that after the Mel Gibson thing... 23 percent would still see a Tom Cruise movie, 75 percent would still see a Mel Gibson movie," said Harris.

"When you see polls like that and somebody's asking that kind of money, you want to get away fast," he added.