What happened to Tom Cruise's career?

What an age we live in!  I remember when a movie gross of $100 million for a film’s entire run was something very few producers could even dream of, and now a film can gross $32 on its opening weekend and be called a flop.

Such is the fate of The Mummy, Universal’s inauspicious beginning to what it is calling its “Dark Universe” series if films.  The movie was envisioned as a blockbuster tentpole feature, but it scored a pathetic 17% at Rotten Tomatoes and its commercials made it look like a generic action film, and an uninspired one at that.

The Mummy continues the late career woes of Tom Cruise, whose career prior to 2007 was a master class in managing a movie career.  It is incredibly difficult for actors to make good choices in picking film roles, as evidenced by those stories of George Raft turning down the lead in The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca and ending up playing a parody of himself in Some Like it Hot.  Cruise has bobbed and weaved, mostly paying action heroes but unafraid to play bad guys (Collateral), unsympathetic characters (Magnolia, for which he got an Oscar nomination and should have won), small roles (his hilarious extended cameo in Tropic Thunder) and even a Nazi (Valkyrie). 

But Cruise seems to have lost his mojo, as Austin Powers would say.  Since 2007, not counting the increasingly tired entries in the Mission Impossible series, he has had a string of . . . not flops, but not successes.  Other than MI:4 and MI:5 the only film he starred in with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of over 65% was Edge of Tomorrow (original title Live Die Repeat), a commercial flop that has an inexplicable Rotten Tomato rating of 91%.  The critical response to his other films has ranged from tepid (Valkyrie at 62%, Oblivion at 53%) to disastrous (37% for Jack Reacher 2, 41% for Rock of Ages).  His only film to cross the $100 million threshold according to RT (again, excepting the Mission Impossible films) is Tropic Thunder, in which he had an extended cameo under a ton of latex make-up, and starred Ben Stiller and got an Oscar nomination for Robert Downey Jr. 

Other lowlights include the first Jack Reacher film, which I was shocked to see had a 62% rating (I thought it sucked), and 52% for Knight and Day, which I thought was wildly underappreciated.  For anyone else this would be a good run, but for a star of Cruise’s magnitude it is underwhelming.

Let me circle back a second to talk about Jack Reacher, a project that demonstrates Cruise’s hubris.  The title character is described in the course material as a mountain of muscle, befitting the casting of Vin Diesel or Dwayne Johnson.  Tom Cruise is in impressive shape for a guy in his late 50’s, but his diminutive stature made it an epic miscast that Cruise thought he could overcome by sheer star power.  There is a line where the police ask a motel clerk if there is anyone staying at the motel who could kill a woman with one punch, and the clerk names Jack Reacher, adding “Just look at him.”  Again, Cruise is impressively buff, but he doesn’t look like he has a killer right hook.  If you cast an actor like Cruise in the role, you have to change that line, unless Cruise’s ego made it stay.

Cruise’s last big non-series hit film was 2005’s War of the Worlds, the Stephen Spielberg directed film that managed to be inferior to the 1953 version made with vastly inferior technology.  Early in his career (1983-89) he had a string of films in the 90% range, like Risky Business (96%), Rain Man (90%), and Born on the Fourth of July (90%). Okay, during that period he also made Legend (48%), Top Gun (56%, but a huge commercial hit), and Cocktail (an astonishing score of 5%), but as long as he hit the occasional home run you could dismiss the misses as an actor taking chances.

I still maintain this—Tom Cruise will win an Oscar one day.  He co-starred when Dustin Hoffman won for Rain Man, and he helped Paul Newman win for The Color of Money.  He has made a lot of people in Hollywood a lot of money, and he is a superb actor.  At some point he will make a critically acclaimed film and, unless he gets trumped by someone doing a celebrity impersonation (as happened to Michael Keaton getting edged out by Eddie Redmayne) he will take home an Academy Award.

What his choices over the past ten years tell me is that he is still willing to take risks, but he is no longer able to hit the occasional home run.  His films do okay at the domestic box office, but they still do great business overseas so he’ll keep getting work.  My suggestion would be to maybe stay away from the sci-fi scripts, as the audience for those films are too young to remember that Tom Cruise is a film icon.

Cruise, despite his movie star good looks, is an extremely talented actor; his work in Magnolia is one of the best performances I’ve ever seen.  He has the same capacity as Cary Grant, who made light comedy appear so effortless you never appreciated how much work he put into it.  The question isn’t about his talent as an actor; it is about his ability to choose suitable film roles.