Rated 4.5 out of 5 by viewers on AlloCiné, the feature film The Shawshank Redemption, released in theaters in 1995, tells the story of a banker wrongfully sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of his wife and her lover. Clinging to hope, he befriends another inmate to survive in prison. The Shawshank Redemption, the film adaptation of the novel of the same name by Stephen King, is led by Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman. The film’s director, Frank Darabont, had acquired the adaptation rights to the novel The Shawshank Redemption. At one point, Rob Reiner, who had previously directed Tom Cruise in The Mighty Ducks, offered Darabont a large sum of money to direct the film with Tom Cruise in the role of the banker. However, Darabont refused to give up the director's chair. Even without Rob Reiner as director, Tom Cruise hesitated a lot and was very close to portraying Andy Dufresne on screen. He participated in a screenplay reading session, but ultimately declined the offer at the last moment. "I think Tom was a bit nervous about working with a new director. I don't hold it against him for that," says Frank Darabont to USA Today. "But he might have been too imposing for the film I wanted to make. It wasn't a role like The Fugitive's Luke, the kind where you look for a Paul Newman. It was a bit less daring, more subtle than that." In the end, it was Tim Robbins who got the role of Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption. Tom Cruise, who will be in the movie Digger on September 30, went on to star in Mission: Impossible.