Cary Elwes also thinks Tom Cruise saved Hollywood
Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One star Cary Elwes joins Steven Spielberg in crediting Tom Cruise with saving cinema
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Tom Cruise has long been acknowledged as an era-defining movie star, but it was only during the COVID era that he evolved into the Protector of Cinema. He attempted to throw Christopher Nolan a bone by publicly seeing Tenet in theaters. His adamant insistence that Top Gun: Maverick have a strict theatrical release led Steven Spielberg to declare that he “saved Hollywood’s ass and [might] have saved theatrical distribution.” Now Warner Bros. is even calling him in to do damage control by promoting The Flash. All over the entertainment industry, stars are singing Cruise’s praises.
Count co-star Cary Elwes amongst their number. Elwes first appeared alongside Cruise more than 30 years ago in Days Of Thunder, and will share the screen with him again in Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One. “Tom is someone I look up to a great deal,” Elwes tells The Independent. “I’m sure I speak for many when I say he saved our industry. We have to recognise that. He believed Top Gun: Maverick should be seen in cinemas, that the audience was there and they wanted to go back in and he was right and cinema chains stayed open because of him. He saved our industry. How many people can you say that about? Not many. He’s the last great movie star.”
No one can argue the power that Cruise wields in Hollywood, though some might argue that he’s not the only one who saved the industry. Jamie Lee Curtis, for instance, would like to throw her hat in the ring. She pointed out on The Late Late Show With James Corden that “my movies have made $2.5 billion in box office and that Tom Cruise isn’t the only one who saved show business.” (Curtis’ COVID-era projects include Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends, which did well enough at the box office but also streamed simultaneously on Peacock. Everything Everywhere All At Once, for which Curtis won an Oscar, was of course a smash success at the box office, particularly for an indie.)
Regardless of who exactly is the true savior of cinema, Cruise has the additional distinction of being exactly “the same guy” he was back when they were shooting Days Of Thunder in 1990, according to Elwes. “He’s extraordinary. He’s remarkable. The stunts he does are literally death defying,” the Princess Bride alum gushes. “You hold your breath watching them and he finds them hysterically funny. That’s just what he loves to do.”
11 Comments
Tom Cruise is like a Top Gun movie in that he wows you with sheer skill, work ethic, and risk-taking, but you probably shouldn’t consider any deeper moral dimensions. Tom Cruise, in that sense, is also a lot like the real military.
Cruise has the additional distinction of being exactly “the same guy” he was back…in 1990, “He’s insufferable. He’s a prick.”
I never worked with the guy… But many many MANY of my friends did on a couple of re shoots on a couple flicks. Every one of them says he’s a prince of a guy. His problem is that he expects everyone to have the same passion he has for his project. That’s a high bar to clear
Oh no, not that Tom Cruise photo again. There’s something off-puttingly weird about it. Like, even more than Tom Cruise already can be.
He looks like someone forgot to turn on the AC at Madame Tussauds.
He looks like Jason Bateman cosplaying as Tom Cruise.
If anyone could save cinema, it’s the guy who saved Scientology.
I just really don’t understand this POV at all. You could say that Tom Cruise saved Top Gun: Maverick by insisting it be seen in cinemas. You might even go so far as to say he saved Paramount, though I doubt the studio would actually die without him. Anything further than that is ridiculous. A lot of people going to see one movie doesn’t save an entire industry. And even if it did, there’s half a dozen other people you could give more credit to than Cruise, not least of them being James Cameron. Cameron is even more committed to the theater experience than Cruise, and is somehow less obnoxious about it. Why isn’t he collecting all these laurels from everyone?
Of course, even Avatar won’t save theaters, because individual movies making billions of dollars doesn’t necessarily ripple out, and we’ve certainly seen that to be the case now. About the only ripple effect Cruise had is that now half of the movies I see in theaters have some little tag at the beginning from the actors thanking me for going to the movies. This is like the opposite of those “You wouldn’t steal a car” messages on DVDs back in the day, in that it’s actually sort of sweet and considerate instead of insulting and condescending, but still ultimately too late to induce an effect, since I’m already there.
Frankly, the only thing actually in the business of saving the business is Disney, which had been propping up theater attendance for over a decade before the pandemic, and is still doing so today. Of course, even that’s not sustainable, because nothing is going to stop theaters from dying. It’s not anyone’s fault in particular, but nobody, not Cruise, Cameron, or Christ is going to convince people to go back to an outdated way of watching media. The landscape has permanently changed, and a lot of people need to start adjusting now lest they end up being swept away like silent film stars in the age of talkies.
I don’t think it is necessarily the amount of people that TGM got to the theatres. There are many other films who did just as good and better at that. I think some of it comes from him standing up to Paramount about it being released straight to streaming. This has been a re-occurring battle between studios and everyone else in the industry. By doing so he has shown the studios that people will still go to the theatres. A lot of movies are just being released either straight to streaming or with shorter theatre runs or releasing simultaneously. This has a knock on effect on theatres and all the people they hire. There is also the fact that MI 7 was one of the first ‘big’ movies (or possibly even the first big multi-location movie?) to start filming during the pandemic. People who work in the industry (who aren’t big time movie stars or directors) were losing their jobs, their livelihood and income. MI 7 actually set an example for how to film in COVID-19 that many movies followed. Different people have spoken about it briefly in interviews, but I imagine we will hear more in the BTS/interviews for MI7. Anyway I think I find it more amusing that all the compliments are coming from different people. Yet people act like Cruise is proclaiming himself king of cinema or something. Cruise just seems to brush them aside or thank everyone as a whole for their hard work etc…
Full marks to Cary Elwes for being gracious and giving credit etc., but …
Pretty sure I’d rather watch Cary Elwes in Princess Bride again, before watching anything Tom Cruise has done.