Monday Morning Quarterback Part II

By BOP Staff

April 24, 2013

Soccer image used to surprise all!

New at BOP:
Share & Save
Digg Button  
Print this column


Max Braden: I think to start with, considering how intense he is in every role, and some of the chaos in his personal life, it's remarkable he's performed at a such a high level for so long. Among the other leading men who can trace their stardom to movies in the ‘80s - Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Gibson, Murphy, Willis, and even Gere, Quaid, and Costner - Cruise is still the one you want to call first when making a big budget movie. To date, when paired with the right concept (such as Mission Impossible), he's been a huge success. When he's acted in unexpected and potentially laughable roles, like in Tropic Thunder and Rock of Ages, he's come out unscathed. Jack Reacher showed some recent weakness, but I'd blame that as much on the material as any waning stardom. Cruise has been able to hold on to his youthful appearance for so long that it will be interesting to see if that just extends his prime years, or if his aging process will lose some of his fan base and make it difficult to succeed in non-action roles. I think that if he picks projects well, he'll still have another strong decade ahead of him, putting him in company with long-career leading men like Sean Connery and Clint Eastwood.

Brett Ballard-Beach: I saw him on The Daily Show and for the first time, I saw a hint of an older Cruise not so much in the face but in the eyes (he and Jon Stewart were joking about the fact that they're the same age). It was startling (but not in a horrible kind of way, more like a different kind of handsome way) and suggested to me the kinds of roles that he could begin taking on in coming years. Hollywood is too fickle for me to ever accord with certainty a superstar's sell-by date, particularly for someone like Cruise who has given great performances in a myriad of genres but is seen primarily as a commercial presence who will take the pretty boy tag with him to the grave. Since he still has the power to pick and create projects, I think he's solid, from a commercial standpoint, for at least the next decade.

Edwin Davies: I think he's on a downward slide, but it's an incredibly gradual one that has been going for quite some time now. Looking back at his filmography, it seems that the golden period for him was from 1992, the year A Few Good Men came out, to 2005 with the release of War of the Worlds. During that time, he was in 14 films that earned at least $100 million domestically (and in 13 of them he was the lead or co-lead, with Austin Powers in Goldmember being an exception because he's only in it for about 30 seconds) with only smaller films like Magnolia and Eyes Wide Shut falling below that number, though neither was expected to do that sort of business. Even seemingly non-commercial films like Vanilla Sky and Collateral became huge with his involvement. He had a magic touch almost unparalleled.




Advertisement



Since 2005, he's only been in three films that managed the same feat; Mission: Impossible III, which was great but underperformed compared to its predecessors and budget, Tropic Thunder, which again was in a cameo appearance, and Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, which is the only unqualified hit on his CV from the last seven years. The rest is made of flops like Knight & Day and Rock of Ages and middling results like Jack Reacher and Valkyrie. What this demonstrates to me is that while he can still draw a crowd in his signature role as Ethan Hunt, he's definitely entered a new phase of his career, one in which he is no longer able to make every film a smash, at least domestically.

Internationally, he's still a draw and that will probably keep him in leading roles for another decade or so, but there's going to come a point where films in which he tries to be the Tom Cruise of the '90s begin to look kind of sad and pathetic. Cruise has always been a very savvy actor who knows when to shift gears, so I wouldn't be surprised if we see him move into more low-key stuff before he reaches that point. I do think that Oblivion, the mooted sixth Mission: Impossible film and All You Need is Kill will represent the beginning of the end for him as a headliner of huge blockbuster action films, though.


Continued:       1       2       3       4

     


 
 

Need to contact us? E-mail a Box Office Prophet.
Friday, March 29, 2024
© 2024 Box Office Prophets, a division of One Of Us, Inc.