Why Tom Cruise is unlike any other movie star

Yahoo

12-05-2025

Tom Cruise is arguably the last true movie star. More than any of the other famous names in today's Hollywood, he's a one-man army when it comes to powering a film up the box office charts. As much as his character in the Mission: Impossible franchise is called Ethan Hunt, ultimately nobody thinks about him as anything other than Tom Cruise.
Cruise, though, has another trick up his sleeve that separates him from other A-listers. Alongside his clout as a marquee name who can sell anything, he has become a maestro of marketing as well as an incredibly gifted actor. Even in the social media age, he has shown over and over again that he can get a movie into the headlines — making sure everybody knows it's heading to cinemas.
He is currently promoting The Final Reckoning, which is being sold as his final appearance in the guise of Hunt. Cruise paid a visit to the UK last week and, not content with taking part in a discussion about his career, decided to hop up on to the roof of the BFI IMAX in Waterloo for good measure.
For the previous Mission: Impossible film, the entire marketing campaign leaned heavily on just one Cruise moment — "the biggest stunt in cinema history". On the first day of the shoot for the movie, Cruise jumped a motorbike off a ramp in Norway, launching himself into thin air — and he repeated the stunt six times, as if once wasn't terrifying enough.
It's one thing to do this stunt, but another entirely to have enough confidence in the film to give it away in the marketing campaign. By the time Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning made its way into cinemas in July 2023, anyone who had visited a multiplex at all that year had seen its biggest stunt a thousand times. But, this being Mission: Impossible, there were plenty more stunts on show in the actual movie and the motorbike moment spent most of the year in the headlines.
Ultimately, Dead Reckoning arrived into a summer box office dominated by the Barbenheimer phenomenon and, as a result, Dead Reckoning made just $571m (£433m) — not enough for one of the most expensive films ever made to break even, despite Cruise's best efforts.
Watch: Tom Cruise films the "biggest stunt in cinema history"
But there were no sour grapes on Cruise's part because he's a devoted champion of not just his own movies, but cinema as a whole. In August 2020, he posted a video of himself heading to the cinema to see Christopher Nolan's time-bending thriller Tenet, at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic meant a lot of viewers were staying away from the multiplex. Cruise was then at the heart of the first big multiplex success of the post-pandemic era when Top Gun: Maverick made $1.5bn (£1.1bn) worldwide, earning headlines describing him as the "saviour of cinema".
Days before Dead Reckoning was about to hit cinemas in 2023, Cruise tweeted photos of himself and director Christopher McQuarrie with tickets to see Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. "This summer is full of amazing movies to see in theatres," he wrote.
Cruise did the same thing this year, sharing a picture on Instagram of his ticket for Michael B Jordan vampire movie Sinners. "Must see in a cinema and stay through the end credits," he wrote. Cruise is, of course, using his platform to market his own movie — he knows that every write-up will include a mention of The Final Reckoning — but he's also advocating for cinema as an art form.
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Tom Cruise (@tomcruise)
Cruise's marketing is smart and shrewd, of course, but it never comes across as cynical. It's easy to believe in his earnest love for cinema and his equally earnest desire to test his body with adrenaline-fuelled stunts and spectacles. He appeared at the Stade de France during the closing ceremony of the 2024 Olympics, abseiling from the roof to mark the handover to Los Angeles as the 2028 hosts.
Casey Wasserman, president and chairperson of the LA28 committee, told Entertainment Weekly: "About five minutes into the presentation, [Cruise] goes: 'I'm in. But I'm only doing it if I get to do everything'."
Frankly, it feels a lot like this is the sort of thing Cruise would want to be doing with his day anyway, even if there wasn't a camera pointed at him. But that's at the heart of the mythology that makes Tom Cruise marketing dynamite. Everything feels like it's being done out of love, with the commercial benefit of it just emerging as a cheeky bonus.
There's nobody doing what he does in terms of marketing, willing to put his body on the line when the time comes and show off his cinemagoing diary as well. His eye for marketing has been honed over the last 15 years, starting arguably with the 2011 photo of him perched atop the world's tallest building while filming Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. It's enough to give anyone vertigo just looking at it.
He has discovered that the best way to market movies in the modern era is to lean into his movie star status and his reputation as the man with the biggest death wish in Hollywood. But what's truly fascinating is the way he uses that reputation and status to elevate and support other movies. A rising tide lifts all boats when it comes to cinema and, if it lifts them high enough, Tom Cruise will inevitably jump off.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning will be released in UK cinemas on 21 May.