How Tom Cruise changed Hollywood forever: “Yes, I am taking credit for it”
Despite being credited with almost single-handedly saving cinema when Top Gun: Maverick was released, that wasn’t even the first time Tom Cruise had revolutionised the industry, according to Tom Cruise, anyway.
It’s up for debate whether or not the high-flying legacy sequel did drag the box office back from the brink, especially when takings continue to lag behind pre-pandemic levels and any movie that makes a billion dollars is treated as more of an anomaly than it was before 2020, but he happily took the win.
Normally, a solitary actor and producer being pinpointed as the saviour of cinema could go straight to their head, but this is Tom Cruise we’re talking about, so he was hardly lacking in confidence beforehand. He knows what he’s worth, and he knows what he brings to the table, which is why he’s one of the few stars who can genuinely get away with calling themselves a one-man ground-breaker.
Admittedly, it’s still a bit arsey, since it’s difficult not to sound like a twat when you talk about yourself as having reinvented the business as everyone knows it. On the other hand, it’s hard to say that he’s undeniably wrong, since he really did play a major role in upending how movies are packaged, sold, and marketed to global audiences.
These days, whenever a big-budget blockbuster is released, the cast and crew tour the world, holding glitzy premieres in major cities. That wasn’t the norm back in the 1980s, though, but Cruise opted to combine his love of cinema with his love of jet-setting to take Tony Scott’s Top Gun on a global tour.
“I said, ‘Let’s do it so I can go to that city, have a premiere there, do the red carpet and press line, then go to the next city and do it again,” the diminutive action hero recalled. He was told it was a waste of time and money, which aren’t things you can say to Cruise, because he’ll find a way to do it anyway.
“In the meantime, I did all of the math,” he elaborated. “And after four or five years of this, I finally told them, ‘OK, here’s the deal. I’m not going to promote your movie unless you do this. I just won’t’. So they finally said, ‘Oh god, he’s being a jerk, I guess we’d better do it’. I assured them that if it failed, I’d own it, it would be on me. So we started doing it, and we saw it was successful.”
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As recently as the 1990s, the domestic box office was usually the be-all and end-all for a film’s chances of commercial success, unless it was a phenomenon like Star Wars, Jurassic Park, or Titanic. The international market hadn’t really been tapped into and utilised to the fullest extent until Cruise came along, put his reputation on the line, and said that he’d take the fall if overseas audiences didn’t give a shit.
Obviously, they did, and it left him feeling a little smug. So smug, in fact, that when he was asked if he was naming himself as the main reason behind anywhere up to and beyond 70% of a film’s ticket sales coming from outside of the United States, he didn’t sugar-coat it. “Yes, I am taking credit for it,” he declared. “And that’s not a joke.” Even if you choose to believe Cruise or not, it’s clear that you won’t be able to change his mind.
