There is no debate: Tom Cruise is the greatest movie star who’s ever lived. Greatest actor ever? We didn’t say that. But box office toppling, record breaking, dare-deviling, Hollywood movie star? No question, he is the greatest. And he has been for decades.
But it was recently announced that, upon inking a very handsome but not exclusive deal with Warner Bros., Tom Cruise will be starring in an upcoming film from multiple Oscar winner, Alejandro G. Iñárritu. This is riding on the back of yet another exciting rumour, that Cruise will also be starring in the upcoming Quentin Tarantino film, The Movie Critic, two directors known for granting their actors an Oscar-winning performance. So this begs the question, is Cruise gunning for that little gold man?
‘Serious’ acting is often seen through the lens of Daniel Day-Lewis and Christian Bale, i.e., losing/gaining copious amounts of weight, remaining in a wheelchair for months, completely transforming the self to physically become this character, and being completely insufferable on set. But if you talk about physically transforming for a role, who does that better than Tom Cruise? Taking nothing from Day-Lewis, but would he ever fly his own helicopter through the most chaotic terrain? Would he jump off the edge of a cliff with a motorcycle and parachute back to land? Would he hold his breath for, like, ten minutes? And yet somehow, these performances are not seen as ‘serious’ acting, something Top Gun: Maverick co-star, Miles Teller, rejects, especially when it comes to the Oscars.
“100 Percent [Tom Cruise was Oscar snubbed for Top Gun: Maverick]. And I’m not saying whoever got nominated didn’t deserve to get nominated,” Miles Teller said last year. “But when you think about everything that he’s [Cruise] doing in that film. What I’ve said when I’ve been talking about Tom’s performance in this film, we give actors so much credit in movies for performing skills, for playing instruments or singing or gaining weight and losing weight. The skills that Tom is putting on display in Top Gun and so many of his movies, that’s a product of thousands of hours practice,” he noted. “I think we don’t realize how much work and effort goes into that. I think a lot of time we associate performances on screen with effort. We like to applaud effort. Tom does it so seamlessly you don’t realise.”
But convincing the Academy that a performance is Oscar worthy is often misplaced, even when performances should, unequivocally, fit the criteria (just ask Jake Gyllenhaal over his snub for 2014’s, Nightcrawler).
According to a recent report from Variety, Cruise wants to steer away from action films, and “return to working with auteurs like Paul Thomas Anderson,” like he did in 1999’s Magnolia, for which he gained an Oscar-nomination in a career defining performance (notable performances include The Color of Money [1986], Rain Man [1988], Born on the Fourth of July [1989], Eyes Wide Shut [1999], and even Jerry Maguire [1996]). “Earlier in his career, Cruise benefited from being directed by heavyweights like Spielberg, Scorsese and Kubrick, but then he moved into a Mission: Impossible-oriented phase where he routinely defies the laws of time and gravity.”
According to a report from ThePlaylist, Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group chiefs Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy met with Cruise in January to discuss their nonexclusive “strategic partnership,” and one of the projects that came up as a possibility was Tarantino’s The Movie Critic. The scoop is that The Movie Critic, and ostensibly Tarantino’s final film, is currently not set up with a distributor, and all the studios, including Warner Bros., are frothing to have it.
Cruise and Tarantino were slated to collaborate on the director’s last film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood…, but the role eventually went to Brad Pitt, who picked up an Oscar himself for the performance.
As for the upcoming Cruise and Iñárritu rpoject, not much is known other than that the script is has been written by Iñárritu, Sabina Berman, Alexander Dinelaris, and Nicolas Giacobone.
In the meantime, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part Two will release next year, 2025, so we have some more ass-kicking to look forward to before Tom Cruise replaces his motorcycles, racecars, helicopters, parachutes, machine guns (the list is endless) with, in his world, presumably something a bit less physically demanding.
