“This is the best movie I’ve seen in years”: the British cult classic Tom Cruise saved from the scrapheap
In recent years, Tom Cruise has been heralded as the saviour of Hollywood for shepherding a key film of the post-Covid era to cinemas. At a time when industry analysts were seeing the writing on the wall for movie theatres and the film industry as a whole, he was fighting tooth and claw to get Top Gun: Maverick released on the biggest screens possible.
Originally slated for a 2019 release, the hotly-anticipated sequel to Tony Scott’s 1986 classic, Top Gun, was pushed back to 2020 due to reshoots and then pushed back again thanks to the pandemic. For a while, its fate was up in the air, so to speak, as Cruise repeatedly refused huge sums of money to release the movie on streaming platforms. When Top Gun: Maverick finally appeared on the big screen in 2022, it smashed box office records, soaring past the billion-dollar mark in a matter of weeks. When Stephen Spielberg credited Cruise with “saving Hollywood’s ass,” few industry experts could disagree.
It turns out that Cruise has been saving cinema in one way or another for more than two decades. Long before Hollywood was on the brink of collapse in the aftermath of the pandemic, there was a small British film that was struggling to get funding. Guy Ritchie’s directorial debut, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels had been independently produced for less than £1million in 1998, but no one wanted to distribute it. Following a card sharp who gathers his friends together to pull off a dangerous heist to make good on a debt to a notorious crime lord, it’s a fast-paced, fast-talking comedy full of the kind of stylistic flourishes that became the director’s trademark.
For potential distributors, however, it was unsellable. Reflecting on the post-production period, producer Matthew Vaughan told Mark Kermode that the best deal he could get was for the film to go straight to VHS. After some pleading, he got a deal that would have put the movie in only two theatres in the UK. In a last-ditch effort to save the movie, he called up one of his producing friends in the US.
“I rang up Trudie Styler and I said, ‘Trudie, do me a favour,’” He remembered. “‘Can you get Tom Cruise to come to this buyers’ screening in America?’ And she went, ‘Are you mad? You use stars for the premieres.’ And I said, ‘No. There’s never going to be a premiere of this.’ And Cruise, to his credit, turned up in this tiny little screening room on the Sony lot, and it was hysterical because you had all these mid-level executives sitting there, and Cruise walked in. He saw them all sit up and pay attention, all getting on their phones, and suddenly, all these senior executives joined the screening. At the end, Tom got up in front of everyone and said, ‘This is the best movie I’ve seen in years, you guys would be fools not to buy it.’”
Not only did this lead to a deal, it led to an all-out bidding war. When Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels was released, it was a hit. It may not have been the highest-grossing film of the year, but in terms of return on investment, its $28million in sales was pretty decent. Earnings aside, it punched Guy Ritchie’s ticket to Hollywood and cemented Vaughan’s status as a hit-making machine. It also helped establish Cruise’s reputation as a star with a nose for potential box-office returns
