1. By the Numbers
$8.2 billion
Amount Cruise’s movies have grossed worldwide.
5%
Rotten Tomatoes score for 1988’s Cocktail, Cruise’s worst-reviewed movie.
98%
Rotten Tomatoes score for 1983’s Risky Business, Cruise’s best-reviewed movie.
18,000
Pairs of Ray-Ban Wayfarers sold in 1981.
360,000
Pairs of Ray-Ban Wayfarers sold in 1983, the year Cruise wore them in Risky Business.
37
Number of movies Cruise has been in, including Edge of Tomorrow.
$694.7 million
Worldwide gross of 2011’s Mission: Impossible–Ghost Protocol, Cruise’s best-performing movie.
$1.2 million
Gross for Losin’ It, Cruise’s worst-performing movie.
$75 million
Cruise’s biggest paychecks, which he reportedly received for both the second and third Mission: Impossible movies.
3 Oscar nominations
0 Oscar wins
7 Golden Globe nominations
3 Golden Globe wins
6 Razzie nominations
2 Razzie wins
500%
Reported increase in naval enlistees who said they wanted to be pilots after Top Gun’s release in 1986.
2. The Oprah Effect
How much did Cruise’s couch-jumping really hurt him?
Note: The post-Oprah movies exclude Tropic Thunder (just a cameo) and Lions for Lambs (in which he had a supporting role).
3. A Career on Two Wheels
Outside of a pair of Ray-Bans, Cruise’s favorite movie accessory is a motorcycle.
Top Gun (1986)
Days of Thunder (1990)
Mission: Impossible II (2000)
Mission: Impossible III (2006)
Knight and Day (2010)
Oblivion (2013)
Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
4. His Face: An Evolution
5. His Secret Inspiration?
Cruise’s two most recent movies bear strong resemblances to the work of director Duncan Jones.
Duncan Jones’s Moon (2009)
A solitary lunar miner discovers he has a doppelgänger and that both were sent to the moon to work by the same evil corporation.
Tom Cruise’s Oblivion (2013)
A solitary repairman on postapocalyptic Earth discovers he has a doppelgänger and that both are working for evil aliens.
Jones’s Source Code (2011)
An Army pilot finds himself in a computer simulation that makes him relive the same eight minutes over and over again until he finds the culprit in a terrorist bombing.
Cruise’s Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
A military officer relives the same combat mission over and over again until he defeats a race of evil aliens.