Tom Cruise Holds 1 Box Office Record That May Never Be Surpassed
No actor has ever achieved such consistent success, and it's unlikely that anyone else will.
For four decades, Tom Cruise's name has echoed throughout Hollywood, featuring in incredibly successful blockbusters that have made profits for both production companies and himself.
As of 2023, Cruise holds the title of one of the highest-grossing actors of all time, a distinction few can claim.
Despite an incredibly prolific acting career, only one movie starring Tom Cruise has actually managed to make over a billion dollars at the box office. That would be Top Gun: Maverick, which brought in nearly $1.5 billion. While this pales in comparison to popular franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe that regularly kill at the box office, what sets Tom Cruise apart is that he manages to make money from movies that are not part of any universes or franchises.
Most other big-name actors today, such as Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, or Vin Diesel, are all tied to specific franchises and have been playing the same characters over and over again to put food on the table(or marble on the bathroom floor, more likely). The former two have been in every MCU film, whereas the latter is the face of the highly successful high-octane Fast and Furious franchise and has also appeared in the MCU as The Guardians of the Galaxy's Groot.
Standalone projects, even with big-ticket actors, tend not to do very well at the box office unless the big-ticket actor is Tom Cruise. So how has he managed to consistently succeed where others have lately been failing with equal consistency?
Nobody really knows the answer to that, perhaps he just has a natural knack for choosing projects that just work by offering audiences a healthy balance of originality and entertainment, while franchise superstars tend to go full arthouse for their standalone 'indie' projects and lose money. But that's just a theory, of course.
Cruise has appeared in over thirty original, standalone features that have grossed over $100 million worldwide. These include such classics as Rain Man, Jerry Maguire and War of the Worlds. He has also played very different characters over the course of his career. The only thing that's always remained the same has been that if a movie has Tom Cruise in it, it makes money. Tom must really have taken to heart the Jerry Maguire maxim, 'Show me the Money'.
Recently, Cruise has been mostly focusing on his own pet franchise, Mission Impossible, which has also been a great success, with every instalment turning a healthy profit at the box office. We can only hope he finds time to make more movies set in our world rather than in some cinematic universe and make money in the process. If anyone can pull it off, that would be Tom Cruise