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Business Insider
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Insider
Tom Cruise has a smart career strategy that's helped him stay relevant after 40 years in Hollywood
Tom Cruise returns with death-defying stunts in "Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning." In 2023, Cruise told Business Insider that he's "always pushing" to make his films bigger and better. Cruise's commitment to his craft, including doing his own stunts, keeps audiences coming back for more. Tom Cruise has been entertaining film fans for over 40 years and, despite weathering his fair share of controversies, is widely considered the last great movie star. How did he do it? The answer is simple: stunts. In the 15 years since the release of 2011's "Ghost Protocol," the fourth " Mission: Impossible" film, Cruise has done increasingly hair-raising stunts in each of his new movies: whether he's climbing the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, or clinging to a plane as it takes off. Earlier in his career, Cruise acted in a greater mix of genres, including the 1994 horror "Interview with the Vampire," the 1996 comedy-drama "Jerry Maguire," and the 1999 erotic thriller "Eyes Wide Shut." In that era, he was considered widely a sex symbol. Now, he trades in extaordinay feats. Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning." View this post on Instagram A post shared by Eammon Jacobs (@eammonjacobs) "Every time they say, 'Can you top it? Can you not top it?' We're always pushing. Every film I do, whatever genre it's in, I want to make it as entertaining as possible for that audience. I know I can do things better," he said. And it's a winning tactic. " Top Gun: Maverick," in which Cruise flew in real fighter jets, raked in $1.5 billion in 2022, while "Dead Reckoning," where he leapt off a mountain on a motorbike, made $567 million. In "Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning," which is out on Friday, Cruise performs two nerve-shredding stunts: a scuba dive into the wreck of a submarine that rolls down into an ocean trench, and the climactic third act, where his character clings on to a biplane in flight. It's expected to make $80 million in its opening weekend, The Hollywood Reporter reported, citing the National Research Group. Cruise's enduring star power can even grab the attention of the most seasoned industry insiders. Rob Mitchell, the director of theatrical insights at film tech company Gower St. Analytics, recalled working as a sales analyst at Paramount in 2011, when employees did a set visit to see Cruise climb the Burj Khalifa. "Everyone was taking pictures inside the Burj Khalifa, with Tom Cruise outside waving in," he told BI. These sorts of stunts signal to audiences that Cruise is a bona fide star who is hardworking and takes his craft seriously—all ingredients of a movie more likely to be worth their hard-earned cash. Referring to "Mission: Impossible," Mitchell said: "There comes a point where people aren't really going for the story as much as they are for the excitement and the thrills." "In an era dominated by CGI superheroes, Cruise's staying power lies in the 'authenticity' of his performances," Stuart Joy, the course leader of film and TV at Solent University, UK, told BI. "Like Christopher Nolan, he champions analogue filmmaking in a digital age. But while Nolan does so behind the camera through practical effects and large-format film, Cruise embodies it on screen through real stunts and real danger." Cruise's dedication to filmmaking has taken him around the world. During an interview at the BFI in London in May, he said he would "force" studios to send him to different countries to learn how movies were made there. He also said encourages younger stars to "spend time in the editing room, produce a movie, study old movies, recognize what the composition is giving you, know what those lenses are, understand the lighting and how to use it for your benefit." Last year, Cruise's "Top Gun: Maverick" costar Glen Powell told GQ that he was sent to a theater in Los Angeles to watch a six-hour "film-school" movie that Cruise made just for his friends. "[Cruise] is like: 'Do we all agree that this is what a camera is? This is the difference between a film camera and a digital camera…' The funniest part is on flying. It was like he put together this entire flight school. So he would literally go 'OK, this is what a plane is. Here's how things fly. Here's how air pressure works,'" Powell said. Centering his career around stunts is a smart PR move As well as being undeniably impressive, stunts help to keep past controversies out of the conversation, Joy said. "Cruise's transition from character-driven roles to stunt-centered performances seems intentional, not just as a creative decision but as a deliberate attempt to recalibrate public perceptions of his star persona," he said. "After the mid-2000s controversies (most infamously the Oprah's sofa moment and scrutiny of his ties to Scientology) Cruise has successfully redirected the audience's attention," Joy added, referring to the moment in 2005 when he jumped on Winfrey's sofa while talking about his love for his then-girlfriend, and now ex-wife, Katie Holmes. "Rather than inviting emotional connection through vulnerability, he now earns our praise and admiration through the spectacle of physical risk," Joy said. Next, Cruise plans to shoot a movie in space with his "Edge of Tomorrow" and "American Made" collaborator, director Doug Liman. In 2020, Deadline reported that Universal planned to spend $200 million on the film, and collaborate with Elon Musk's SpaceX to shoot it. Cruise and Liman were originally set to take flight in 2021, but the project is yet to materialize. If it does get off the ground, audiences will likely flock to see "the ultimate Tom Cruise movie," as Mitchell puts it. But wherever Cruise's career takes him next, Joy said that one thing is for certain: "He's made himself the guardian of a traditional cinematic spectacle."
Forbes
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Inside The Secretive, Pay-For-Play World Of Movie Trailers
Anyone going to see Marvel Studios' Thunderbolts* this weekend can expect to watch eight—perhaps even 10—movie trailers before the feature begins. Throw in an ad for popcorn and Nicole Kidman waxing poetic about the power of cinema, and the pre-show lineup can stretch to nearly a half-hour. Even if that can seem like a drag to an audience, those are highly valuable minutes to both the movie studios and the theater chains. In an era when theatrical attendance continues to decline—the domestic box office grossed $8.7 billion last year, a dip of more than 3% from 2023, and ticket sales dropped 7%—trailers remain the top driver of awareness and decision-making for most moviegoers. According to National Research Group's biannual survey, 36% of those between the ages 12-74 say they first heard about the most recent movie they saw in theaters through a trailer, more than any other source. Because Thunderbolts* is the first anticipated blockbuster of the summer movie season—the 18-week period between the first of May and Labor Day that accounts for 40% of the annual box office total in the U.S. and Canada—its preview space is one of the most important marketing opportunities for the biggest releases, including Paramount's Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Universal's Jurassic World: Rebirth, and Warner Bros.' Superman. With fierce competition for these theoretically finite slots, there's another reason for the increased number of trailers—theater chains are selling preview time to the highest bidder. 'The most valuable real estate this industry has is trailer play. That's where we cross-pollinate success,' Neon CEO Tom Quinn said last month at Cinemacon in Las Vegas. 'But I, as an independent, don't always get trailer play. I have to go buy that trailer play with every other studio. And we play a big game, but it's very expensive.' The particulars of this pay-to-play system are whispered about with a level of secrecy that Ethan Hunt's Impossible Missions Force would appreciate. Despite the symbiotic relationship between studios and theaters—or mutually assured destruction, depending on who you ask—the two sides often operate on a need-to-know, no-paper-trail basis. For fear of upsetting the delicate system, neither side is eager to speak on the record. According to Hollywood lore, it was Sony executive Jeff Blake who first began paying for trailer placement in 2001. Back then, theaters averaged four previews per movie. The two slots closest to the actual feature were guaranteed to the company distributing the movie, and the others were chosen by the theater operator. That is until Blake shelled out an estimated $100,000, split among four theater chains, to ensure that a 60-second preview for the Rob Schneider comedy The Animal played in front of that summer's big May release, The Mummy Returns. Today, Hollywood's major studios routinely strike year-long marketing agreements with major theater chains including AMC, Regal and Cinemark to guarantee trailer play in front of the biggest releases. Those deals range from $2 million to $5 million each, proportionate to the size of the chain, and can include other in-theater marketing opportunities such as ads on concession stands or theater marquees. What exactly that money buys, however, is not always clear. Most moviegoers would assume the trailer system would be similar to any other advertising expenditure, but in practice studio executives say it can often feel closer to a bribe. Studios typically select 'target' preferences for which trailers to put with which movies, and exhibitors reply with a certain percentage of screenings it can offer for each title, usually between 50% and 100%. The tradition of reserving the two final previews for free for the studio that produced the movie continues to hold, but the value of the other four to six slots is constantly in flux. Six-figure transactions for additional trailer play can often materialize at a moment's notice. This dynamic marketplace is driven by a movie's predicted popularity, the amount of money paid, and above all, the fear of competition. Further complicating the marketplace, each studio has no idea what the others are paying a particular chain, and chains don't know what each studio is paying the competition. Beyond that, studios don't know whether the preview screenings they receive will be in the best auditoriums or the best showtimes. To help strategize, some studios have hired third-party trailer auditing companies, who send people to physically sit in theaters across the country and write down the order of all the trailers played before a given movie. 'It's always been sensitive and back room,' says one distribution executive, who believes there should be more transparency but declines to be identified by name. 'It's coming from this place of we're going to maximize our leverage against you. A lot of theatrical distribution is rooted in that tradition.' Until the pandemic, Disney was known for never having to pay for trailer placement because of its dominant position in the marketplace. The mere threat of withholding a film or increasing its rental fee (the percentage split of box office gross) was enough to ensure good trailer placement from theater chains. Rival studios also relied on Disney's new releases so they could advertise their biggest movies ahead of them. However, Disney has only held the largest market share of the domestic box office once in the five years since the pandemic, and in recent years Hollywood insiders believe the company has started to participate in the pay-for-play trailer system like everyone else. (Disney declined to comment for this story.) The trailer strategy gets even more complicated after that. Any preview slots not reserved by these annual guarantees are sold on a one-off basis or in mini-packages to independent distributors such as A24 and Neon, who in some cases pay up to $1 million across all the chains to secure a percentage of trailer play in front of a particular movie. The irony of this high-pressure environment is that it is relatively low stakes. A presumed blockbuster like Thunderbolts* has a marketing budget of well over $100 million, and the amount of money spent on TV advertisements for one movie alone can be more than a studio might spend on trailer placement for the entire year. Still, studio executives say that reaching people who have already bought movie tickets and then getting their undivided attention for a trailer can often the moment when they decide whether they want to see an upcoming movie. Meanwhile, TV commercials, digital ads and billboards serve primarily to remind viewers of a movie's release date. That's why studios can spend as much as $200,000 to produce a two-and-a-half minute trailer—or, in the case of Thunderbolts*, even three full-length trailers across a seven-month marketing campaign. This combination of the increased length of trailers and the increased inventory over the years has seemingly pushed some moviegoers to the edge of their patience. In Connecticut, a state senator introduced a bill in January that would require theaters to post the movie's actual start time as opposed to the time when the previews begin.. And at CinemaCon, the national gathering of theater owners, there were multiple conversations around reviving the effort to cap trailers at two minutes (a guideline sent out in 2014 by the National Association of Theater Owners was mostly ignored by studios). 'People love trailers,' says Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst at ComScore, a leading box office data provider. 'But [theaters] have to walk that fine line—you don't want to overdo it because then you burn people out before the curtains even open on the feature." For studios, a good trailer often doubles as the most impactful piece of digital marketing in a movie's campaign, once it is posted on YouTube and other social media platforms. According to the same NRG survey, Gen-Z moviegoers said that social media and word of mouth outrank trailers in influence, but when asked what type of social media content drives their choices, trailers once again reigned supreme. Brandon Katz, a box office analyst at Observer and former senior strategist at the Los Angeles-based Parrot Analytics, says that online trailer views are a strong indicator of box office performance. 'That's a big data point that we use here internally in our forecasting,' Katz says. 'Having trailers available online is a real game changer for movie marketing.' There is, however, one other marketing force that in recent years has proven even more powerful and unpredictable—online virality. When a movie catches on organically—whether it's an army of teen 'Gentleminions' in suits going to see Minions: The Rise of Gru, the M3gan dance trend, or the recent 'chicken jockey' mania around A Minecraft Movie—it can cause a movie to vastly overperform the predicted box office results. But attempts by distributors to create those viral moments have proven largely futile, so for now, the focus remains on trailers. 'I think what everyone in this industry has learned is that viral moments of the movies have to be organic. You can't will a Barbenheimer into existence,' says Katz. 'But in a theater, you know you've got their attention. And you've got two to three minutes to sell the movie. That is so valuable.'
