‘Batman & Robin’ being such a flaming dumpster fire may have inadvertently cost Marvel its one (and probably only) chance at landing Tom Cruise

Unless something drastic changes, two places you won’t be seeing Tom Cruise anytime soon – or ever, for that matter – are streaming exclusives and superhero stories.

Of course, we can all remember the rumor mill exploding into life when far too many people convinced themselves that blur in those Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness promos heralded the surprise debut of the Mission: Impossible icon as a Tony Stark variant, while unfounded speculation has linked him with the Marvel Cinematic Universe for almost as long as the franchise has existed.

The scuttlebutt isn’t without merit, obviously, considering Cruise was considering an offer to headline Iron Man in the late 1990s, but since then he hasn’t even come close to circling a comic book adaptation in an official capacity. The MCU can get pretty much whoever it wants based on the cavalcade of A-listers and legends to have popped up over the years, but cinema’s foremost daredevil has never seemed like a realistic get.

As it turns out, Batman & Robin may have played a part in keeping Cruise away from Marvel long before a shared universe was a twinkle in Kevin Feige’s eye, with new book MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios noting that his “asking fee at the time was more than even a profitable studio like Fox was willing to risk on an untested superhero property.”

That would have been after Joel Schumacher’s neon-and-nipples dumpster fire but before Blade, X-Men, and Spider-Man gave the genre a new lease of life and turned it into a cultural phenomenon at the turn of the millennium. It can never be ruled out with 100 percent certainty that Cruise won’t find his way to the MCU eventually, but if he doesn’t, then he’ll always be one of its biggest-ever “what ifs?”