Tom Cruise‘s 2023 maybe didn’t go exactly the way he was planning. After he single-handedly “saved cinema” with 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, everyone expected Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning to similarly blow up the box office. Except it didn’t. Clearly, Cruise is in need of a new franchise. Enter… DC?
Earlier this week, the Ethan Hunt actor was announced to have signed a new deal with Warner Bros. to produce both franchise and standalone movies for the studio, which left fans convinced that Cruise was about to be snapped up by James Gunn’s DCU any day. Well, in a major slap in the face to everyone’s hope that he could become, say, our next Green Lantern, Cruise has immediately high-tailed it back to Paramount to make what’s either the safest or the riskiest bet of his career.
Tom Cruise could be making his next most-anticipated movie with Paramount, not his new pals at Warner Bros.
Although it’s not being widely reported just yet, Hollywood insider newsletter Puck is claiming that Cruise is officially working on Top Gun 3 over at Paramount Pictures. If you’re confused how this makes sense given his recent Warner Bros. deal, it was stated before that the actor/producer’s agreement with the studio was non-exclusive and that Cruise was expected to continue his working relationships with both Paramount and Universal at the same time.
On the one hand, then, it’s a no-brainer that Cruise is supposedly moving forward with a sequel to Maverick — the only question is why it’s taken this long. Easily one of the most acclaimed, and most profitable, action movies of the decade so far, Maverick spawning even more Top Gun flicks seems like a license for Paramount to print money. And yet the relative financial disappointment of Dead Reckoning does raise concerns that maybe Maverick was just lightning in a bottle and can’t be repeated.
If Top Gun 3 comes and go without anywhere near as much success as its forebear then it may just fuel his critics’ opinion that Cruise’s days of drawing in audiences on his star power alone are over. That in turn could then leave his potential options at Warner Bros. looking slim, perhaps even closing the door on a major role for him at DC. Then again, if TG3 does capitalize on the Maverick phenomenon then it would prove that Cruise is back in business and the doors to the DC kingdom could be opened wide for him.
It’s all up to you, Tom. Happy flying.
