Tom Cruise is pivoting back to prestige

Cruise has spent the last few years making action movies, albeit all-time great ones. A new report says he’s looking to pivot back to working with big-time directors.

Going forward, Tom Cruise movies might be featuring a bit less running.

It’s been said that Cruise is one of the last true movie stars, and he has indeed survived as a movie star for more than 40 years. He’s shown a capability for both blockbusters and the types of films that contend for Oscars. In some cases, he’s made prestige movies with top directors which also did very well financially. 

Throughout his career, Cruise has worked with such directors as Steven Spielberg, Barry Levinson, Michael Mann, Francis Coppola, Paul Thomas Anderson, Rob Reiner, Cameron Crowe, Ed Zwick, and Oliver Stone, as well as the late Stanley Kubrick, Tony Scott, and Sydney Pollack. He’s gotten three Oscar nominations for acting, for Born on the Fourth of July (Stone), Jerry Maguire (Crowe), and Magnolia (Anderson), although he’s never won.

None of those Oscar nominations, however, have come in the last 20 years. And for the past decade, Cruise has mostly concerned himself with action films. He made Edge of Tomorrow — much loved, but a flop at the time — the underrated American Made, the great Top Gun Maverick, and the three most recent Mission: Impossible films, with another on the way in 2025.