Tom Cruise: The Last Movie Star

In the 1980s, Tom Cruise emerged

fresh-faced as the brightest star in Hollywood.

Everything was there.

The smile, the charm, the physicality.

There is an intensity, a drive; and that drive

and that determination manifests itself on screen.

More often than not, if you went to see a

Tom Cruise movie, it would be a good movie.

Yet after a staggering run of box-office hits, at the

height of his success, he suffered an unexpected fall from grace.

In 2005-2006, he basically has kind of a public image meltdown.

In terms of whether anyone could have foreseen that Tom

Cruise would manage to rebuild his career, I think maybe

the only person who potentially saw it was Tom Cruise himself.

With his career in jeopardy, he refined his on-screen

persona and risked life and limb to get back to the top.

I think there is an element of him wanting to excel at everything he does.

Being the consumer, complete entertainer, wanting to do it

all, that's what makes him so interesting as an action star.

The fact that he's doing something that's just

outrageously dangerous becomes part of the appeal of the films.

There's another layer of excitement to it, and

there's a certain morbid fascination with the fact

that he keeps doing this, and how far is he going to take it?

This film looks at Tom Cruise's unlikely and

remarkable career revival, one that has seen him

regain his crown at the pinnacle of the film industry.

People look at Cruise and see him as a movie star in the classic mold.

There's not a lot of people out there who

Hollywood is still building movies around their persona.

He's Tom Cruise.

He's not just a big star still.

He's the biggest star, and I don't know if anybody's had that long

of a stretch where they were the biggest star in the world when they

were 25, and they were the biggest star in the world when they were 60.

May 2022, having been delayed for nearly two years, Top

Gun Maverick is finally released into cinemas worldwide.

And all eyes are on its star and producer, Tom Cruise, who was

launched into Hollywood's top tier by the original film back in the 1980s.

This sequel brings his remarkable journey

full circle, and it quickly becomes a phenomenon.

Audiences starved of entertainment and spectacle

by the COVID pandemic now flood back into theatres.

And within a month, the film becomes the

highest grossing release of Cruise's entire career.

Yet his return to the role of Pete Maverick

Mitchell after a 35-year break was no sure-fire success.

If I told you three years ago that Top Gun 2 would not only be

one of the biggest moneymakers of all time, but that it would be

nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, you'd think I was crazy.

I don't think Maverick's success was guaranteed, and I don't

think that everyone thought it was going to be this giant hit.

You have to go back to Titanic to see a movie that had this kind of,

that was this big of a hit and also endured as long as it did, that

stayed in theaters, that was in the top five consistently for months on end.

People really, really liked this thing.

I think it hit the right buttons for a lot of people.

There's sort of a perfect storm surrounding Top Gun Maverick.

By now, Top Gun had been seen by generations of

movie lovers and had become just more and more

popular, and there had been talk of a sequel for years.

And again, I think Tom Cruise was very smart.

This was the perfect time for that.

People were celebrating going back to theaters,

they were celebrating big, giant, well-made action

movies, and there's Tom Cruise right at the center of it.

And perhaps more surprising than Top Gun Maverick's triumph at

the global box office was the fact that only 15 years

beforehand, Tom Cruise's future as a headline star had looked in doubt.

Los Angeles, 2005.

Hitting the red carpet with new romantic partner Katie

Holmes by his side, Cruise is in town to promote his

latest film, Steven Spielberg's adaptation of War of the Worlds.

He is riding high at the top of Hollywood's

A-list, but this is simply the calm before the storm.

He's been one of the biggest stars in the planet.

Between 1992 and 2005, 2006, he has an incredible run,

where almost every movie he does makes around $100 million

or more, at least, back when that was actually a lot of money.

So he's incredibly consistent box office-wise.

Having established his career with a string of dramatic

roles, in the new millennium he is reinventing his star

persona and transforming from a heartthrob to an action hero.

But while the promotional tour is in full swing, a series of PR

blunders risk permanently damaging his previously impeccable public image.

He becomes action over anything else.

He's going full tilt at this point, really, isn't he?

But then he also kind of does that offscreen, too,

unfortunately, which culminates in the terrible year of 2005.

He had the incident where he's on the Oprah

Winfrey show and he's jumping on the couch.

You know, Katie once told Seventeen Magazine, yes!

Which became one of the first viral moments, you know, early kind

of YouTube and people just having so much fun making fun of that.

But then it was all the stuff where he started talking,

really, for the first time about, you know, his beliefs.

And also kind of doing it in quite an aggressive way

and attacking Brooke Shields for using entity

presence to deal with her post-natal depression and all of that.

For the first time, the kind of the public view of him soured.

He was a figure of ridicule to a certain extent.

He had a huge female fan base.

What happens after 2005, 2006 is female audiences start to turn on him.

And right around this time, he basically loses

his production deal with his studio, Paramount.

This was a serious career crisis, where all of a sudden Tom

Cruise, who had had nothing but really positive PR for the

first, what, 20 years of his career, was becoming a punchline.

That's a problem.

The actor's fall from grace was as unexpected as it was rapid.

Hollywood's most bankable star had tarnished his reputation, and

many doubted that he would ever find his way back to the top again.

And his remarkable career revival would be an uphill

battle compared to his initial journey to the peak of the

movie industry in the 1980s, which had seemed so swift and steady.

Tom Cruise was 18 years old when he headed for the

bright lights of New York City, determined to become an actor.

The teenager from Syracuse, born Thomas Cruise

Maypother, quickly signed with an agent and

within two years landed his first feature film roles.

And although he received high billing on romantic drama Endless

Love and comedy Losing It, it was his work on two ensemble

pictures, Taps and The Outsiders, that brought him to wider attention.

I think it was pretty clear early on that he had

something, you know, maybe this intangible quality

that's hard to define, but I think there's a kind of

angry energy to some of his work that's really key to his appeal.

Taps, he was part of a group and his character was

quite a dark character, he was an aggressive character.

And it is interesting from those early days, early

Cruise, a lot of people thought he was kind of like,

you know, he'd be a bad guy, he'd be the psycho in things.

It's beautiful, man.

It's beautiful.

But then that kind of intense psycho energy got

channeled, you know, towards the light, towards the good side.

Well, I think he was pretty relentless in

his ambition, his desire to sort of get ahead.

It's interesting to see Cruise in Coppola's The Outsiders because

he's not the Cruise that we know, but there is a scene, prior to a

fight scene, where he suddenly does this sort of backflip off a car.

Apparently, he improvised it, reminding the

director, the audience, everybody else, you

know, I may be just one of the characters in the background.

You know, I'm not the lead.

I'm not Matt Dillon.

But, you know, you're gonna look at me.

And with this desire to be center stage, in 1983, he headed to Hollywood.

With producers recognizing his star potential, he bagged

the lead role in college football drama All the Right

Moves, which brought him his first million-dollar paycheck.

Yet it was the commercial and critical hit

satire Risky Business that propelled him to stardom.

It was Cruise's presence in Risky Business.

I mean, it was his big lead breakthrough role.

And, you know, everything was there.

You know, the smile, the charm, the physicality.

It lays on his image of a hunk, but there's also

something kind of ridiculous and adorable about him.

That iconic scene where he's dancing in his tighty-whities, I mean, it's funny.

He looks ridiculous.

And that's kind of always been Tom Cruise's appeal.

He's a little too good-looking, but he's also

able to kind of slightly poke fun at his image.

So, how we doing?

Looks like University of Illinois.

In his early films in particular, Cruise had this brashness, this cockiness.

And I think he just had that

mix of charm and physicality.

Even though he did make actually a real variety of

films, he always seemed quite similar in all of them.

But, you know, he was so likable and so good at

doing that, that it, you know, it didn't really matter.

I mean, with all the great Hollywood stars of the

studio period, the roles are variations of themselves.

They're not character actors, they're stars,

and Cruise from the earliest days was a star.

And he was just waiting for the right time for that star power to be unleashed.

Although hopes were high that his next feature, Ridley

Scott's dark fantasy epic Legend, would propel him into

the A-list, it was a surprising box office disappointment.

Yet the director suggested him for the

lead role in his brother Tony Scott's new film.

Produced by the duo behind breakout hits Flashdance and

Beverly Hills Cop, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, Top Gun

was looking for a charismatic actor to play Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell.

And with John Travolta, Matthew Modine and Rob Lowe

having already passed on the opportunity, Cruise stepped in.

His presence would prove vital, both for the film and his own

career, and Top Gun would become the highest grossing blockbuster of 1986.

I think that you can really play down too much

the importance of Cruise to the success of Top Gun.

Simpson and Bruckheimer, when they were prepping, they wanted

someone for Maverick who would be aggressive,

but in a positive way.

What's your problem, Kazansky?

You're everyone's problem.

That's because every time you go up in the air, you're unsafe.

I don't like you because you're dangerous.

That's right.