Tom Cruise’s characters are defined by their enthusiasms. Jerry Maguire boosts his clients. Daniel Kaffee wants the truth, whether or not he can handle it. Maverick feels a need — a need for speed.
In real life, Cruise, 62, has enthusiastically cast himself as the great champion of cinema. You can almost hear the deep-voice narration over the trailer: In a time when movies are endangered after a pandemic and the streaming age, one man stands up for old-fashioned filmmaking — with stark stories and real stunts intended for the Cineplex.
In 2020, during the first Covid summer, Cruise posted video to social media of going to Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” (“Big Movie. Big Screen. Loved it”). An introduction ran before screenings of “Top Gun: Maverick” in the spring of 2022 in which Cruise thanked audiences for “seeing it on the big screen.” As Cruise put it in another short video: “I love my popcorn. Movies. Popcorn.”
As he invariably does in his movies, Cruise has succeeded. “You saved Hollywood’s ass!” Steven Spielberg told him a pre-Oscars lunch after “Top Gun: Maverick” grossed $1.5 billion, Variety reported. The turnout proved people would still go to the movies en masse.
As his latest blockbuster, “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” hits theaters Friday, it is clear that Cruise’s persona has stuck. His press tour has featured his own paeans to moviemaking and fans’ appreciation for his commitment to doing his own stunts and even how he eats popcorn.
Cruise’s career appeared somewhat endangered 20 years ago. He was becoming notorious for his devotion to the Church of Scientology, which defectors have accused of institutionalized abuse. He jumped on Oprah Winfrey’s couch. He sparred with Matt Lauer, calling psychiatry “a pseudoscience.”
But two decades later, Cruise, who declined to comment, remains arguably the world’s biggest movie star, in no small part because he became the most affectionate version of The Onion’s parody of him: A guy who really, really digs movies.
“He loves movies. He just also makes them,” said Joe Quenqua, a media strategist and former Disney executive. “If there was a moment when Tom Cruise was a different version of Tom Cruise, we’re not talking about it now. It’s a blip.”
The Cruise persona works because it seems genuine. The appeal of his famous stunts — scaling the world’s tallest building, riding a motorcycle off a cliff, hanging off a biplane thousands of feet in the air (as in the new movie) — is precisely that it is he, Tom Cruise, who is performing them.
Cruise is relentlessly on message. In London this month, he waxed eloquent about the importance for movie actors “to understand what the lens is.” He once made a P.S.A. urging consumers to turn off motion-smoothing on their televisions, because motion-smoothing “makes most movies look like they were shot on high-speed video rather than film.”
“There’s other people who love the deal or this or that,” Doug Liman, the director of Cruise films “Edge of Tomorrow” and “American Made,” said in an interview. “Tom loves movies — he loves going to the movies, making movies, talking about movies. It’s kind of extraordinary.”
The first 20 years of Cruise’s career saw him taking risky roles with prestigious directors like Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Stanley Kubrick and Paul Thomas Anderson. It was Cruise who selected Brian De Palma — your favorite director’s favorite director — to direct the first “Mission: Impossible” film.
In 2011, the fourth “Mission” movie arrived, its central set-piece a spectacular, self-performed stunt (scaling Dubai’s Burj Khalifa tower). It set the template for the next four, all of which have been directed by Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie, and for the subsequent phase of Cruise’s career, which has consisted almost entirely of action roles.
When Cruise has a scandal now, it does not undermine his persona, it reinforces it. In 2020, the Sun newspaper published leaked audio of Cruise berating crew on the set of the seventh “Mission” for violating Covid-era protocols by standing too close together, threatening a set shutdown. “If I see you do it again, you’re gone,” Cruise yelled, with an expletive. Later asked for comment, Cruise replied: “I said what I said.”
Cruise’s movie-loving persona also jibes with the difficult, but not impossible mission of getting his latest movie, with a budget reportedly approaching $400 million, into profitability. Two years ago, “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning” was boxed out of premium-priced IMAX theaters after a week by Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.” The new “Mission,” Cruise’s ostensibly final turn as Ethan Hunt, received a three-week window after Cruise made a personal case and pledged to use IMAX cameras and premiere in IMAX.
“We almost never give three weeks,” Rich Gelfond, IMAX’s chief executive, said in an interview.
Meanwhile, Cruise’s social media co-sign has become an unofficial mark of a blockbuster. Among the films to get Cruise’s stamp of approval are “Oppenheimer,” “Barbie,” “Twisters” and, weeks ago, “Sinners.”
Gelfond texted Cruise to thank him for supporting “Sinners,” which was filmed with IMAX cameras. According to Gelfond, Cruise responded quickly: “He said, ‘When one movie wins, we all win.’”
Marc Tracy is a Times reporter covering arts and culture. He is based in New York.
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