For a man who has been the biggest movie star on the planet for four decades, Tom Cruise has been surprisingly picky about franchises. He only really has three: Mission: Impossible, Top Gun, and Jack Reacher. That number is about to change.
A Days of Thunder sequel is officially moving forward at Paramount, with Jonathan Levine in talks to direct, Jerry Bruckheimer producing, and Cruise returning as Cole Trickle. Filming is expected to start in 2027.
A couple of his films sit just outside the definition. The Mummy was a reboot built to launch a shared universe, and The Color of Money was a sequel to The Hustler. But Cruise only ever headlined one entry in each, so neither counts as his franchise. Here are his three franchises, ranked.
3. Jack Reacher Never Became Tom Cruise’s Next Big Franchise
Jack Reacher was fighting an argument before a frame was shot. Lee Child’s Reacher is written as a wall of a man who is six feet five and roughly 250 pounds, and who is someone rooms go quiet around. Cruise is nowhere near that, and book fans said so loudly.
The strange thing is that the 2012 film mostly works anyway. Christopher McQuarrie opens with a genuinely chilling sniper sequence, the mystery underneath it is solid, and Cruise throws himself into the fights with the commitment he always brings. Taken as its own thing, it is a perfectly good thriller that grossed around $217 million.
Then Never Go Back arrived in 2016 and undid all of it. The novel it adapted is one of Child’s most decorated, but the film swapped procedure for a personal story about a possible daughter. It was exactly the thing Reacher, a character defined by having no attachments, cannot support. The action got bigger and less believable at the same time. It killed the series, and left the first film with nobody defending it.
2. Mission: Impossible Set a Benchmark for Modern Action Movies
Almost no franchise gets better as it goes. But Mission: Impossible did. Brian De Palma’s 1996 original and John Woo’s 2000 follow-up established Ethan Hunt and the IMF, but neither gave Cruise much of an interior life. He was a professional doing professional things.
It took until J.J. Abrams’ third film in 2006 for the series to work out that Ethan needed something to lose, and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s villain gave it real teeth. From there it climbed steadily. Ghost Protocol changed the rules entirely, with Brad Bird sending Cruise up the Burj Khalifa and turning practical stunt work into the franchise’s identity.
Fallout was the franchise’s peak, featuring Henry Cavill’s turncoat, the HALO jump, the helicopter chase, and a 98% critics’ score. Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning closed things out with more emotional weight than a spy series had any right to carry after nearly thirty years, even if the enormous budgets meant neither landed as a financial win.
1. Top Gun Proved How to Make the Perfect Legacy Sequel
Tony Scott’s 1986 film is where Cruise the action star begins. The premise of Top Gun, about the best pilots in the Navy sent to a school that only produces one winner, was clean and instantly gripping, and the flight sequences looked like nothing else at the time.
Then came the 36-year wait. Nobody expected Top Gun: Maverick to be anything more than nostalgia, which is exactly why it worked. Joseph Kosinski put the cast in real jets and shot them for real, producing aerial footage audiences had genuinely never seen. Cruise gave one of the most vulnerable performances of his career in this movie.
It is the only billion-dollar film he has ever had, and comfortably the biggest of his career. It also pulled audiences back into theatres at a moment when the industry badly needed it. A third movie is already confirmed in this franchise.
Which Tom Cruise franchise sits at the top of your list? Do you think Days of Thunder can join them? Let us know in the comments.
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
