Paramount Pictures
With an estimated $56 million domestic debut this weekend, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation marks the 21st time a movie starring Tom Cruise has topped the North American box office since Cruise headlined director Ridley Scott's fantasy adventure Legend in 1986.
That is a remarkable commercial legacy, one Cruise's few peers of decades-spanning A-list movie stars cannot touch. (By comparison, Julia Roberts has starred in 12 box office number one hits since Pretty Woman in 1990; Will Smith has starred in 14 since Bad Boys in 1995; Tom Hanks has starred in 15 since Splash in 1984; and Harrison Ford has starred in 16 since Star Wars in 1977.) It is also, however, the first time Cruise has had a number one hit in the summer movie season since 2006, when Mission: Impossible III opened with $47.7 million. And it demonstrates just how essential the Mission: Impossible franchise is for Cruise if he wants to maintain his status as one of the world's biggest movie stars.
Cruise in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation
Paramount Pictures
Indeed, there was a time when putting Tom Cruise above the title of your film virtually guaranteed that film would be a number-one-grossing box office sensation. Starting with A Few Good Men in 1992, every single film starring Cruise topped the domestic box office, save for 1999's Magnolia, an ensemble indie drama that opened with a limited release (and earned Cruise his third Oscar nomination, for best supporting actor). That commercial winning streak ended, however, with M:I3 in 2006. Since then, the only films starring Cruise that have opened at number one in North America are 2011's Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, and 2013's sci-fi thriller Oblivion— the latter of which opened with zero box office competition in April, the first time a Cruise movie had debuted outside the summer or holiday season since 1986's The Color of Money.
This is not to say Cruise is somehow a commercial pariah. As the chart below makes clear, he continues to have a massive impact on the global box office. In fact, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol was the biggest worldwide hit of his entire career.
Adam B. Vary for BuzzFeed News / Paramount Pictures; MGM; Warner Bros. / Via boxofficemojo.com
But those are raw box office numbers unadjusted for ticket price inflation. And while it is virtually impossible to accurately gauge the growth in ticket prices worldwide since Cruise first became a star, we can adjust for inflation for the domestic box office, with data from Box Office Mojo. And on that score, Cruise's relative box office might in North America has waned considerably, especially since 2005's War of the Worlds.
Adam B. Vary for BuzzFeed News / Paramount Pictures; MGM; Warner Bros. / Via boxofficemojo.com
Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Cruise's career knows what happened in 2005: He started dating Katie Holmes, jumped on Oprah Winfrey's couch, and lectured Brooke Shields about postpartum depression. The blow to his popularity was inescapable. Cruise has since labored to remind people why they enjoyed seeing so many of his movies, but it is clear that he will never reclaim the box office heights he reached in the 1980s and '90s.
But the irony of Cruise's career downslide is that his star was fated to diminish even if his 2005 PR implosion had never happened. In the last 10 years, Hollywood has shifted away from a movie star economy and into a franchise economy. Newly minted A-list movie stars like Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt, and Robert Downey Jr. reached that st