Tom Cruise and The Challenges of Super Stardom as Retirement Approaches
Paramount PicturesNow that Top Gun: Maverick has opened in theatres and in the span of a weekend has made a quarter of a billion dollars (nearly $100 million more than the project’s reported budget), Tom Cruise has hurdled a number of significant recent-career obstacles in the span of days. To the naked eye, the megastar wouldn’t seem to be struggling. A month away from his 60th birthday, he’s still a handsome Hollywood leading man, he’s beyond wealthy, and he continues to look like he’s 38 (a Cruise-localised phenomenon going on for about 30 years now). However, there are big economic battles raging in the movie industry, and Tom Cruise has sonic boomed over them — for now, at least.
As everyone knows, Cruise’s career has been a storied one and one with many properly iconic films and dozens (yes, more than one dozen) of huge, profitable blockbusters. However, the things that make Cruise the most fascinating Hollywood A-lister in history are his business savvy and capacity to adapt to market change. He has been in the realm of Hollywood royalty for all or parts of an astonishing five decades. In the 1980s, Cruise hopped around middling projects briefly and established an image as a good-looking, confident All-American kid next door. When that image fused with fighter jets and Tony Scott’s music-video audio-visual aesthetic, Tom Cruise became a megastar and an iconic A-lister to counter the emerging Stallone- and Schwarzenegger-musculature that was finding its foothold at the box office of the day.
Cruise’s post-Top Gun career reflects a little-discussed but intentional business strategy, and it is worthy of note. Following Top Gun, the young maverick would slowly position himself as leading man on projects working with A-list, Oscar-nominated directors and revered auteurs. A couple exceptions, of course, but after 1986, he worked with Martin Scorsese, Barry Levinson, Oliver Stone, Sydney Pollack, Neil Jordan, Cameron Crowe (twice), Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, Tony Scott (again), Steven Spielberg (twice), Michael Mann, Robert Redford, Brian De Palma, and John Woo. Many of these collaborations were during an unparalleled run from 1992 to 2007, when Cruise starred in 13 (out of 15 films) that grossed over $220 million. The two that didn’t? Massive prestige projects Eyes Wide Shut and Magnolia. Cruise, using his star power and collaborative spirit single-handedly championed auteur cinema bringing proven storytellers to cinemas on a blockbuster scale and for an extended period like no other star, producer, or studio chief ever had – except possibly for Spielberg himself. If one takes a careful look at comparable, bankable Hollywood stars from 1985 to 2005, they will find that they tend to target specific genres (Adam Sandler) or their time in the stratosphere was a much shorter flight (Mel Gibson, Julia Roberts). Will Smith and Tom Hanks were undeniable tent pole brand names themselves in the 1990s, and each of them gravitated away from comedy and into successful serious projects. However, they would often return to familiarity and franchise work to reassert their brand recognition — something that Cruise mostly avoided doing until Mission Impossible III; the second Mission was more about keeping his auteur collaboration streak going.
The early 2000s presented itself as a new era — one of multiple-chapter movie series as opposed to a film market of redundant sequels. Lord of the Rings, the Star Wars prequels, and Harry Potter would start this trend, and the likes of MCU and Pixar would solidify this Hollywood business model. Cruise had no real foothold in this emerging world order. Mission: Impossible II was the highest-grossing film on the planet in 2000, but it was not a world-building film in the way we know them today. Perhaps unintentionally though, the John Woo collaboration marked an important tonal shift for the series into an action franchise – which it arguably wasn’t before. As a result, and also in the context of sustaining his star power and relevance, Cruise would choose to re-brand himself. He would phase out the auteur-collaborations slowly and replace it with his era as an action hero. The man seldom held a gun onscreen prior to Mission: Impossible II, but it would become a fixture post-90s. Minority Report, Collateral, Knight and Day, Edge of Tomorrow, Jack Reacher, War of the Worlds, and the other Missions—all gun-toting and/or action-spirited.
It was during the late 2000s when Cruise began having a spotty relationship with the changing box office and the movie-going public. His big hits were offset by films that performed relatively poorly — you know, for him — and he had, for the first time ever, an honest-to-God financial and critical stink bomb (Lions for Lambs). His star wasn’t twinkling as brightly, and with social media gossip-mongering gaining prevalence as he was awkwardly hopping on Oprah’s furniture, he found himself with new PR challenges unlike any in the previous 25 years. Cruise’s re-branding as an action star as opposed to an auteur collaborator also meant that Awards buzz dried up around his projects. Through no real fault of his own, Tom Cruise’s place at the high table seemed in jeopardy.
Tom Cruise has been on the A-list for longer than anyone else in Hollywood’s history. However, in the last decade or so, the entire Hollywood star-system has been shattered by market forces and industry trends. Hanks, Pitt, Roberts, Matt & Ben, Scorsese, Dicaprio — everyone else began embracing streaming services, comic book heroes, or mini-series. Social media has made folks view celebrity differently. Cinemas have become destinations almost exclusively for superpowers and mega-brands. Films aren’t sold on the popularity of stars anymore. Take away Mr. Hemsworth’s hammer, and the man himself — charm, pecs, and all — does very little to encourage customers to attend cinemas. Marvel, DC, Pixar, Fasts, and Furiouses — that’s where it’s at. Cruise alone has doggedly stuck with his belief in the old business model. Star power is just not a box-office marketing tool.
Which brings us to the second significant battle that Cruise cites being engaged in. He’s been fighting to keep theatres open, or at least that’s how he’s been framing his messaging during Covid. Supporting theatre chains during the pandemic and preserving his marketing brand, as it turns out, are inherently the same thing. Streaming services and the coronavirus have decimated theatre-going, yes. But Cruise’s commitment to save cinemas is really just an extension of stabilising the market for his own projects. He went to see Tenet in 2020 and posted a video on Twitter afterward showing him celebrating the event as a ‘big-screen’ cultural experience of the type that needs rescuing. That’s fine, but one wonders if his business affairs are so intertwined with Paramount’s cinematic and streaming plans that he has no choice but to go all-in on public promotion of cinema-going. Paramount’s streaming plans are in their early days, so as such Top Gun and the Mission Impossible series seem to be part of the company’s bigger ongoing streaming and content management strategies, making the ‘save theatres’ rally cry feel a wee bit disingenuous.
Cruise’s efforts in adapting to today’s Hollywood culture are fairly clear. He needs his own cinematic universe (or universes). As it turns out, Mission Impossible, with its action tone and gradual world-building, has given him one to return to. These are not the fun times that they used to be when every new Cruise film was a completely new project from a celebrated filmmaker. However, Mission Impossible has kept him relevant every few years. He’s been trying, to be certain. Efforts to ‘fit in’ to the new blockbuster economy include failed franchise-building efforts like The Mummy. Even the Jack Reacher series — despite making its money back — didn’t really resonate with audiences, and no one is clamouring for more.
Currently, Cruise has the Top Gun sequel and the next two Mission Impossible installments. He’s locked and loaded on projects built for the big screen. There’s no question that his work ethic and business savvy are impressive. He’s still ambitious, and the bigger the project, the more people he’s employing in the industry too, which is worth its own shout out. As far as one man is able, Cruise is generating excitement around going to the cinemas while concentrating on the quality of his work and maintaining his own brand. He seems to be hell-bent on reaching retirement age without having to succumb to the indignity of taking a pay cut to do projects for Netflix or Prime, which ironically is where today’s auteurs are working and where his potential for earning a once sought-after prestige award may lie. The contracts for the Top Gun and Mission series seem to be his Paramount-sponsored golden parachute retirement package, designed to get him to retirement at age 65 – although when he gets there, he’ll still probably look like he’s only 40.