Why It Took Tom Cruise So Long To Make A Billion Dollar Movie

Now that Top Gun: Maverick has finally given Tom Cruise his first billion-dollar movie, it is worth looking back on the star's career to discern why the achievement took so long. Top Gun: Maverick has proven a massive success since its May 27th, 2022 release date, with the long-awaited sequel impressing critics and audiences alike. Acknowledging the original Top Gun's silliness while maintaining a larger-than-life tone of its own, Top Gun: Maverick managed to find a delicate balance between blockbuster fun, 80's nostalgia, and fast-paced thrills.

As a result, the billion-dollar haul Top Gun: Maverick has now earned at the box office came as no surprise to many industry commentators. However, the long-delayed Top Gun: Maverick is the first Tom Cruise movie to cross the billion-dollar mark despite the actor's many successful hits over the years.

Tom Cruise's earliest huge hit, Top Gun, earned over $350 million dollars (over $900 million in 2022 dollars adjusted for inflation). While he has since come close to repeating this incredible impact, expensive flops like 2017's misjudged Tom Cruise horror movie The Mummy dented the actor's box office acumen. The reliably successful Mission Impossible series has gradually grown more and more impressive over the years, but even its biggest box office success was 2018's Mission Impossible: Fallout. With a haul of $790 million dollars, that sequel's performance was impressive but a far cry from Top Gun: Maverick's take and remained Cruise's best box-office performance (apart from an inflation-adjusted Top Gun) until the much-vaunted sequel's 2022 arrival.

While Cruise has a hugely successful blockbuster career, the actor's lack of a consistent franchise outside of the Mission Impossible movies has proved fatal to his billion-dollar ambitions until now. Mission Impossible was Cruise's only franchise until Top Gun returned in 2022, and the actor's attempts to make the Jack Reacher series stick with audiences never really panned out. Outside of those moderately successful spy thrillers, Cruise also starred in a string of successful standalone efforts like Oblivion and Edge of Tomorrow.

These sort of one-and-done hits were well-liked by reviewers and became substantial financial successes, but they were also self-contained stories that didn't invite sequels. With many billion-dollar movies, from Avengers: Endgame to Minions being spin-offs and sequels, the lack of a strong existing brand thwarted Cruise's attempts to hit the magic number for years. Cruise's personal brand was enough to get his hits into the hundreds of millions, but even with Miles Teller's Top Gun: Maverick character sharing the spotlight in the sequel; it took the actor allying himself with a well-known nostalgic property to finally score his billion-dollar hit. Whether another Tom Cruise movie will ever be able to repeat this feat after Top Gun: Maverick remains to be seen.

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