Neither ALI nor BAGGER VANCE broke even.
I have thought for years that Tom Cruise has an outstanding ability to pick good projects. Whether that’s due to his agent, himself, or whatever, I will pretty much see anything that Cruise is in. He stars in good movies.
WILD, WILD WEST lost a colossal amount of money.
Bear in mind, there’s a certain chicken-or-egg riddle when it comes to A-List actors.
I happen to like Tom Cruise more than most SDMB regulars do. I’ve liked a lot of his movies, and consider him a perfectly solid actor (OCCASIONALLY, as in Magnolia, a very good one).
But did his movies make huge money because he was in them, or did he get offered the lead role in a lot of potential blockbusters because he was already perceived as a big, bankable star?
Moreover, he’s made quite a few movies that didn’t draw flies! Did anyone go to see Lions for Lambs? No! WHich underscores a point: people like TOm Cruise enough to want to see his movies, but ONLY when he makes a certain TYPE of movie.
At one point, years back, Harrison Ford was the star of 6 of the 10 most popular movies of all time. Now, I like Harrison Ford, but was HE the reason the original*** Star Wars *** trilogy raked in so much money? Of course not. And was he the reason Raiders of the Lost Ark was huge? Again, no. Ford was LUCKY as well as good. And once he was established as a huge star by those franchises, he became the go-to guy for potential blockbusters .
I’m glad to see this thread as there seems to be general dislike on this board. He’s not a great actor but he is very good. I loved him in Collateral and A Few Good Men.
I think more than this if Cruise shows interest in a movie, no other actor has much of a chance at it.
True, despite the terrible pun. He has a very narrow acting range but he is good within that. You never think “here is someone reading words” like you do with some actors, even those who do very well.
I used to hate Tom Cruise in the Top Gun and Days of Thunder years. . . Cocktail? Yuck!
But over the last couple of decades he’s won me over. He’s one of the few actors that hasn’t gotten tied down by a series. Yes, there is the Mission Impossible franchise, but Cruise does his own thing too.
I think only Tom Hanks or maybe Leonardo DiCaprio really compares when it comes to his track record of successful movies.
And at 52 he’s still a viable romantic lead even when paired with a much younger actress like Emily Blunt, 31.
Yeah, but then the bloom came off the rose, right? After starring in a bunch of movies that didn’t double their budgets – Sabrina and The Devil’s Own and Random Hearts – he started headlining crap that failed to break even, with K-19 and Hollywood Homicide. But then he dug deep and mounted a movie-star comeback with Firewall, which, y’know, failed to double its budget, since he’s not, like, Tom Cruise.
It took me such a long time to get over the urge to barf at the mere mention of his name due to Top Gun.
Someone mentioned Oblivion earlier, and I was also surprised at how little he annoyed me in it.
Perhaps, I was being a bit unfair all those years? After all, in Top Gun his character was an overly confident and often obnoxious Navy fighter pilot. Should I have disliked him just because he excelled at the role?
He was great in The Firm. One of his best performances.
1981 Taps
1983 The Outsiders
1983 Losin’ It
1983 All the Right Moves
1983 Risky Business
1985 Legend
1986 Top Gun
1986 The Color of Money
1988 Cocktail
1988 Rain Man
1989 Born on the Fourth of July
1990 Days of Thunder
1992 Far and Away
1992 A Few Good Men
1993 The Firm
1994 Interview with the Vampire
1996 Mission: Impossible
1996 Jerry Maguire
1999 Eyes Wide Shut
1999 Magnolia
2000 Mission: Impossible II
2001 Vanilla Sky
2002 Minority Report
2003 The Last Samurai
2004 Collateral
2005 War of the Worlds
2006 Mission: Impossible III
2007 Lions for Lambs
2008 Valkyrie
2008 Tropic Thunder
2010 Knight and Day
2011 Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
2012 Rock of Ages
2012 Jack Reacher
2013 Oblivion
2014 Edge of Tomorrow
That’s a pretty good list.
Wow!
1981 Taps
I barely remember that one, but good from what I do remember.
Doug Liman, the directory of Edge of Tomorrow (along with Swingers and The Bourne Identity and many other movies) was on an NPR podcast recently, and was asked what really-big-name movie star he most enjoyed working with (with Cruise, Damon and Pitt being the biggest), and he said Tom Cruise showed up for work excited and prepared and was professional but also enthusiastic.
Yeah, that’s what they all say about Cruise - he learns his lines, listens to the director, is patient with the cast and nice to the crew. By all accounts, he’s a pleasure to work with, which is hardly something you can say about many megastars.
A few Good Men is one of my favorites.
**Collateral **is a very underrated film, and Cruise was quite good in it.
I’ve been wondering whether you have a point there, and – I’m still not sure.
Back in '96, the aforementioned Will Smith was in Independence Day, and the as yet unaforementioned Leonardo DiCaprio was in Romeo + Juliet and Marvin’s Room, and Tom Cruise was of course in Mission: Impossible and Jerry Maguire; in the eighteen years since, all three have been in eighteen movies apiece, which I honestly figure sounds about right for a Hollywood leading man.
Smith’s not always top-billed in those – and when he is, his films repeatedly fail to break even; DiCaprio’s not always top-billed either, sure as his films repeatedly fail to double their budgets; how does Cruise, who’s been doing it longer than they have, keep doing it while averaging just as many movies?
Back before DiCaprio was The Great Gatsby, Robert Redford was a hell of a movie star; from '66 to '94, he acted in twenty-six films; from '86 to '14, Cruise acted in thirty; Redford had fewer chances of starring in a money-losing turkey like Havana, but (a) that’s what happened, and (b) again, one a year still seems like a pretty good average for a Hollywood leading man.
Switching gears entirely, consider Schwarzenegger: in 1986, he fails to double the budget on Raw Deal; and, after failing to double the budget of Last Action Hero or Jingle All The Way or The 6th Day, fails to break even with Collateral Damage in 2002. But that’s not the point; the point is, IMDB puts him up on the big screen in seventeen movies over that span, just like Cruise: y’know, leading-man output.
(Okay, granted: Arnold Schwarzengger gets eighteen if we count his brief appearance as Arnold Schwarzenegger in Dave. But then we should give Tom Cruise an eighteenth for playing himself playing Austin Powers in Goldmember, and where does it end?)
Once upon a time I told someone I went to a Tom Cruise movie. Then they asked me what was it about? I said, “Tom Cruise.”
“Tom Cruise, huh? Yeah, I really liked him in that movie where he played the cocky, young guy.” - The Amazing Johnathan
In fairness, I mentioned Arnold Schwarzenegger and Robert Redford and Will Smith in that last post, after mentioning everyone from Woody Allen to Samuel L. Jackson to Clint Eastwood in my first one; whooooole lotta movie stars have a type, is what I’m saying, and Cruise occasionally ventures outside his comfort zone just like the rest.
Once upon a time, John Wayne made a career out of playing John Wayne.
Bumping because, while ROGUE NATION hasn’t yet hit theaters in China – where, y’know, GHOST PROTOCOL cleared $100 million – it’s now earned back more than triple its budget, and is closing in fast on the half-a-billion mark.
Just think of all the other movies that didn’t click since that last post and this one: there’s Johnny Depp failing to break even with MORTDECAI, and Chris Hemsworth failing to break even with BLACKHAT, and Joaquin Phoenix failing to break even with INHERENT VICE, and Tom Hardy failing to break even with CHILD 44, and Sean Penn failing to break even with THE GUNMAN, and Jason Statham failing to break even with WILD CARD, and Ryan Reynolds failing to break even with SELF/LESS, and I’m just getting started, here; it’s easy to make movies that don’t break even, it happens all the time, but somehow Tom Cruise keeps doubling or tripling or quadrupling and et cetera everything he’s top-billed in, back through the decades to TOP GUN.
I still can’t think of any other movie star with a winning streak that long; at this point, I’m just wondering who’s in second place, is all.
(Heck, who was hotter in Hollywood first thing this year than Bradley Cooper, coming off collecting Oscar nods and playing superhero when he wasn’t carrying the whole HANGOVER franchise just in time to hit it big with AMERICAN SNIPER – and then he walks into the two-by-four that was ALOHA? Happens to everyone, I guess.)
Another weekend in the Top Ten, and it’s now quadrupled its budget; the guy with a leading-man winning streak longer than Dakota Johnson’s been alive has a hit that’s bigger than FIFTY SHADES OF GRAY was; it’s bigger than IRON MAN or IRON MAN 2, bigger than THOR or THOR: THE DARK WORLD; and bigger than CASINO ROYALE or QUANTUM OF SOLACE – but why compare it to anything else? This thing is suddenly within spitting distance of being Tom Cruise’s biggest hit ever.