Anyone remember those strange days, way back in the distant pre-Covid era, when the death of cinema seemed to be imminent and even Tom Cruise couldn’t sell out multiplexes? So clouded was the Top Gun star’s future in 2010 that it seemed likely he might fade into oblivion while still in his late 40s. There was even talk that Cruise had slipped off the late Paramount chair Sumner Redstone’s Christmas Card list due to his weird sofa-jumping antics and continuing advocacy of Scientology.
Fast forward to 2023 and thanks to a combination of the pandemic and the march of streaming, box offices globally might just be in an even worse position than they were when Cruise’s now largely forgotten romcom thriller with Cameron Diaz, Knight and Day, proved such a giant turkey. Yet these days he is regarded as the solution rather than the problem.
Ever since the $1bn success of Top Gun: Maverick last year, our toothy-grinned hero has been billed as the saviour of cinema. And that means we’re probably going to get at least another two decades of Cruise jumping off giant buildings, romancing far-younger women and generally behaving as if he’s an immortal, all-powerful being from the galactic federation of Xenu until well into his 80s.
Don’t believe me? This week Cruise told the Sydney Morning Herald he is planning to emulate Harrison Ford, who is currently starring as a swashbuckling octogenarian archaeologist in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. “Harrison Ford is a legend, I hope to be still going, I’ve got 20 years to catch up with him,” he said. “I hope to keep making Mission: Impossible films until I’m his age.”
How is this going to work? The thing about Ford is that he looks like exactly what he is, an extremely robust and healthy 80-year-old. But you get the impression this isn’t going to be enough for Cruise. Given he looks like a really fit (if slightly grizzled) 40-year-old in his early 60s, it seems certain that our Tom won’t be content with anything less than resembling a monstrously virile fiftysomething by the time Mission: Impossible 20 rolls around in 2042. Perhaps Botox and ice chambers are the answer, or maybe it’s time for Cruise to accept that he needs the retro-ageing tech that allowed Ford to appear as the younger Indy in Dial of Destiny … throughout the whole movie.
At some point though, in this hypothetical scenario, it’s going to become obvious that movie Cruise no longer looks like actual Cruise. The mask of reality will slip, and everyone will realise that they’ve been watching a fake feed of the actor shaking hands with the public for two hours at a premiere in Leicester Square, like some freakish Hollywood take on BBC deepfake crime thriller The Capture.
Then again, maybe we’re there already. He can’t really ride a motorcycle off a giant ramp and skydive down to a train in his 80s, can he? Wouldn’t it really have been a whole lot easier to just CGI the whole thing? Or – heaven forbid! – morph the star’s face on to a stuntman’s body in the editing room?
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is all about Cruise taking on a terrifyingly powerful AI and (we have to assume) winning, even though everyone knows that’s about as likely as Wes Anderson making a Lord of the Rings movie. But if he really does want to carry on making these films into his 80s – doing all his own stunts, saving Hollywood from the threat of Netflix and TikTok – we have to assume that sooner or later he might need more than a helping hand from the nefarious digital enemy. After all, there’s impossible and then there’s downright preposterous.
