Hollywood star Tom Cruise has launched his own page on Vkontakte, Russia's largest online social network, to promote his new film, "Oblivion," creating a buzz on the Russian Internet and attracting thousands of followers in a matter of hours.
The creation of the account was announced on Cruise's official Twitter account on Thursday. "VK.com is a European social network w/100mil users & we JUST launched a profile," the message read, followed by "???????????????? ?‚?°??!" — "We'll see you there!" in Russian.
By Friday morning, the veteran action hero had over 16,000 followers, but only 25 friends on Vkontakte, including several that appeared to be bots. "Tom Cruise" hovered at the top of Twitter's trend list on Friday morning. The actor has 3.7 million followers on Twitter.
Cruise's Vkontakte page contained promotional photographs from his new sci-fli flick "Oblivion," in which he stars alongside Morgan Freeman and Ukrainian-born actress Olga Kurylenko as a drone repairman on a post-apocalyptic Earth.
Cruise, 50, Kurylenko and director Joseph Kosinski are expected to visit Moscow next month to promote the film, which premieres in Russia on April 11.
Although Vkontakte is predominantly a Russian-language network, Cruise's promotional crew — "TeamTC," as they call themselves — posted in English with a smattering of Russian words.
They acknowledged being in unfamiliar territory. "What do we need to know...Any tips for us? We're new!" his representatives wrote on Friday morning, a post that was "liked" over 650 times.
It was unclear whether they were aware that most, if not all of Cruise's past films are illegally available for viewing on the social network, which claims to have 190 million registered users.
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