If you clicked on this article, it is likely that you are either a fan of Tom Cruise and/or a fan of the Mission Impossible film franchise.
We’re coming up on the 7th Mission Impossible installment (with an 8th in the works), and I’m really starting to question how impossible these missions really are.
Say what you want about Tom Cruise, but the man might have single handedly saved the movies with last summer’s Top Gun: Maverick. A shockingly 60-year-old Tom Cruise has, without a doubt, still got it, and this upcoming Mission Impossible looks like yet another Cruise classic.
At the bottom of this article is the new trailer for Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning- Part 1, and if you can get past the lengthy title (still a great title though), the movie looks to be another blockbuster hit for America’s most recognizable action star.
How do I know that it will be good?
The trailer only runs 2 minutes and 28 seconds in length and roughly 22 seconds of it is solely dedicated to shots of Tom Cruise running full sprint.
Movie makers have long tried to crack the code of what will get people to buy a movie ticket to their film. Is it star power? Is it a recognizable brand?
Sure, those things help, but nothing makes people say “I’ve gotta go see this” more than Tom Cruise busting his 5 foot 7 inch ass in a mad dash away from danger.
I was skeptical about seeing the new Mission Impossible originally. However, now that I’ve seen Cruise runs for approximately 13% of the trailer, I am all in.
If that 13% ratio holds up, and the movie has a run time of the standard two and a half hours, we could be sitting in the theatre eating popcorn and watching Tom run for a full 20 minutes of screen time. How great would that be?
You might be wondering “why does it matter if Tom Cruise runs in a movie or not?” Fair question, but allow me to point you towards some very convincing data and statistics that can all but confirm that Cruise running helps to make his movies better.
Thanks to some investigating from a website called Slashfilm.com, we know that Cruise has run in his movies for at least 18 minutes of screen time in his entire movie career. However, that article is from 2016, so we’ll have to do a little bit of estimating here.
Since 2016, Tom has been on the silver screen four times (The Mummy, American Made, Mission Impossible: Fallout, and Top Gun: Maverick). Just going by the numbers that we got from the trailer for the new Mission Impossible, let’s say that each of those movies featured Cruise running for 30 seconds (and that’s lowballing it).
So, we can confidently say that Tom Cruise has ran on screen for a total of 20 minutes in his movie making career, and there seems to be something to it (and no end in sight).
Another study from a well known movie review company (that probably everyone goes by when it comes to seeing if a movie is good or not) wanted to solve this hypothesis: the more Tom Cruise runs, the better the movie is.
Rotten Tomatoes‘ intensive study on the correlation between Tom Cruise’s running and a movie’s success showed this:
“Movies featuring Cruise running more than 1,000 feet have a higher Tomatometer average (a huge 71%) than the movies in which he runs less than that, or not at all – and the same movies make more money at the box office, with an average inflated international gross of $538 million.
We also found that the age-defying star has been increasing his movie running as he gets older.
He covered almost the same amount of ground in 2006’s Mission: Impossible III (3,212 feet) than he did in the entirety of the 1980s (12 movies, 3,299 feet ran), and five of his top 10 running films were released after 2010 – the year he would turn 48.”
Is that not unbelievable? There is actual science (always tough to bring up science and Tom Cruise in the same breath) that backs the fact that Tom Cruise running helps make the movie better.
This man, at 60 years of age, is going to run so much that it breaks the box office.
All that just to get you to this bad ass trailer for Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning- Part 1. Enjoy the sneak peak of the movie (and Tom Cruise absolutely booking it) that hits theaters July 12th:
