The biggest movie of the year, Top Gun: Maverick, has finally announced a streaming date. Months after it opened in theaters and broke all kinds of box office records, the powers that be have confirmed that the long-awaited second Top Gun movie will stream on Paramount+ from December 22, so fans will have a chance to revisit the movie over the holidays.
With all its thrilling aerial action and emotionally charged character beats, Maverick holds up to more than a few rewatches. While the Top Gun sequel is one of Tom Cruise’s most rewatchable movies, plenty of his starring vehicles warrant multiple viewings.
10 Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
Cruise managed to score the biggest box office hit of the year with Top Gun: Maverick. Nostalgia for the first movie and affection for Cruise’s iconic title role got butts in seats, but the moving character arcs and riveting aerial action kept audiences coming back.
With an emotionally engaging surrogate father-son relationship at its core, Top Gun: Maverick won over audiences who’d been inundated with CGI with the practical stunt work of a classical old-school action-adventure.
9 Collateral (2004)
In Michael Mann’s slick neo-noir thriller Collateral, Cruise played wildly against type with the role of a cold-hearted assassin. The movie is a tense, character-driven two-hander co-starring Jamie Foxx as the mild-mannered cabbie whose taxi is commandeered by Cruise’s gun-toting hitman.
As usual, Mann keeps the story moving forward at a nice, brisk pace, and a well-matched Cruise and Foxx create an on-screen dynamic that’s worth revisiting a few times.
8 Risky Business (1983)
If Superbad was made in the 1980s, it would look something like Risky Business, the raucous comedy that gave Cruise his breakthrough role. He plays a suburban teenager whose plan to have some fun while his parents are out of town quickly gets out of hand.
Everyone remembers Cruise sliding into the living room to the sounds of Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll,” but there’s so much more to the movie than that.
7 Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011)
Some of the Cruise-starring Mission: Impossible movies are more rewatchable than others. The actor gave the series its U.S.P. – his own mind-blowing, death-defying stunt work – with the thrilling Burj Khalifa sequence in the fourth installment, Ghost Protocol.
Brad Bird’s live-action directorial debut is a quintessential big-budget spy caper with a surplus of dazzling, globetrotting action set-pieces. From the opening prison riot onwards, Bird doesn’t give rewatchers a second to be bored.
6 Jerry Maguire (1996)
“You had me at hello.” Cameron Crowe told one of the most iconic love stories in movie history with the romance of Jerry Maguire. The movie revolves around a prolific sports agent going into business for himself with just one client, but the story quickly refocuses when he falls in love with single mother Dorothy Boyd, the only co-worker who joined him when he left his old unscrupulous agency.
Thanks to Crowe’s sharp direction and Cruise’s palpable on-screen chemistry with Renée Zellweger, Jerry Maguire is a sharp blend of romcom and sports movie.
5 American Made (2017)
Heavily influenced by the frenzied, fast-paced filmmaking of Goodfellas, Doug Liman’s American Made is a stylish biopic of Barry Seal with a dark sense of humor. Seal is a pilot who worked for both the CIA and Pablo Escobar’s drug cartel simultaneously in the 1980s.
With its quick cuts, nonlinear structure, and hefty dose of pitch-black humor, American Made is a fast-moving (and, sadly, underrated) cinematic delight that holds up to many viewings.
4 Top Gun (1986)
The long-awaited sequel to Top Gun managed to outdo the achievement of the original movie, but the first one is still a captivating gem. Fans have been rewatching the first Top Gun for nearly four decades, and it still holds together as an incredibly well-made action film (in spite of its propagandistic overtones).
Cruise was just as endlessly watchable as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell the first time around as he was in the belated sequel, and Tony Scott’s high-octane direction is unparalleled.
3 Minority Report (2002)
When it comes to sci-fi noirs adapted from the speculative works of Philip K. Dick, Blade Runner will always be the undefeatable champion. But Minority Report, the first collaboration between Cruise and legendary director Steven Spielberg, is a close second. Cruise stars as a police chief with the technology to predict crimes before they happen, who gets accused of the future murder of a man he’s never met.
The fiendishly complex plotting holds up to countless viewings, and Spielberg’s vision of a dystopian future is always compelling, even when audiences are familiar enough with the film to anticipate all the twists and turns.
2 Tropic Thunder (2008)
Ben Stiller’s satirical tale of Hollywood movie stars being unwittingly dropped in the midst of a real warzone is one of the best action comedies of the 2000s. Cruise’s scenes as studio exec Les Grossman draw hilarious parallels between the ruthless practices of Hollywood movie studios and the ruthless practices of a lawless, drug-trafficking militia stationed in the jungle.
With its rapid-fire gag rate, star-studded ensemble cast, and incisive take on showbusiness, Tropic Thunder is a truly great comedy that never gets old.
1 Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)
After the fourth and fifth Mission: Impossible movies were built around one breathtaking Cruise stunt that every other scene failed to live up to, the sixth one, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, put one of those stunts in just about every single sequence. When it hit theaters, Fallout was instantly praised as one of the greatest action movies ever made.
It might be two-and-a-half hours long, but those two-and-a-half hours are filled with Cruise doing a HALO jump and riding a motorcycle the wrong way around the Arc de Triomphe and chasing Henry Cavill with a helicopter.