Tom Cruise's Last Act
On Digger, how the Paramount-HBO merger affects his Warner Bros deal, and why the final phase of his career may be his best yet
In honor of Jerry Maguire’s anniversary re-release, I discuss the ridiculously underrated quality of the back half of Tom Cruise’s career, and why I’m looking forward to his movies more than anybody else’s even as he enters his mid 60s.
Tom Cruise is a man with no off switch. And his final act could be his greatest.
He turns 64 this year. Cruise received his first Oscar, an honorary one, in November 2025, handed to him by a Mexican auteur who’d just spent six months directing him in a dark comedy. He closed the book on Ethan Hunt after nearly thirty years and $3.5 billion in cumulative box office. He dated his co-star, broke up with his co-star, and watched their $275 million underwater thriller get shelved in the fallout. He confirmed sequels to two different legacy properties in the same press tour. He has at least six movies in various stages of development, spanning World War II dramas, racing films, comedies, and a project where he plays the most powerful man in the world causing a disaster and then trying to convince humanity he’s their savior.
For the first time in over a decade, Tom Cruise is not making a Mission: Impossible movie, and the question of what he does next is more interesting than anything Ethan Hunt did in his final two outings. The Mission franchise became a trap of its own making. The stunts kept escalating. The profits not so much. Dead Reckoning cost $291 million and made $571 million, which sounds fine until you realize it needed closer to $600 million just to break even. The Final Reckoning cost $400 million. It made $599 million. The reviews softened from the near-perfect scores of Fallout and Rogue Nation down to a respectable but uninspired 80% on Rotten Tomatoes. The biplane stunt was extraordinary. The submarine sequence was extraordinary. The exposition in the first hour was not. The writing couldn’t keep up with the man dangling from the wing of an aircraft at 10,000 feet over Africa, operating the camera himself and lighting the shot by positioning the plane relative to the sun.
The recent stretch of Tom Cruise's career is one that people are only now starting to appreciate properly. I didn’t even know about him that well before this year! I feel stupid! Everything from Ghost Protocol onward represents a man operating at a level nobody else in Hollywood comes close to, and for years the conversation around him was still stuck on couches and Scientology. Maverick changed that. A $1.4 billion box office run forced people to reckon with what he'd been doing for a decade: throwing himself out of planes, breaking ankles on camera, holding his breath for six minutes underwater, learning to fly helicopters, and treating every sequel like a personal dare. The culture is now reorienting around his greatness in real time, and it's overdue. Some recent examples from twitter. Shoutout to Adam Townsend, as always, for spreading the gospel:
The Christopher McQuarrie Collaboration
Tom Cruise is the greatest action star alive. Christopher McQuarrie is a gifted filmmaker who wrote The Usual Suspects at 27. Their collaboration produced Fallout, which I’d put against any action movie made in history. But the back-to-back Dead & Final Reckoning films led to an anticlimactic ending. Bloated runtimes, AI villains that never quite landed, too much nostalgia. At points, they came across as a series of consecutive high quality action sequences more than a cohesive movie.
Reports surfaced in late 2024 that Cruise sought to cast Glen Powell as the new lead for potential future Mission: Impossible installments. Powell, the guy Cruise hand-picked for Maverick, the guy who’s now one of the most bankable young stars in Hollywood. If that happens, Cruise becomes the mentor figure across two franchises simultaneously, engineering his own succession rather than clinging to roles until the audience does it for him. That’s a different energy than most aging stars. While I’m not sure he can carry the Mission franchise just yet (Miles Teller added a lot to Top Gun: Maverick, it was the combined dynamic of the trio that fueled that movie) Powell, for my money, deserves this type of opportunity after seeing him in The Running Man.
McQuarrie and Cruise are still working together. McQuarrie dropped his entire rep team in early 2024, left CAA and his longtime manager, and moved to Cruise’s own attorney. They appeared together at Cannes in May 2025. They have at least four projects in the pipeline together: Broadsword, a WWII film co-starring Henry Cavill and Marion Cotillard; The Gauntlet, a remake of the Clint Eastwood thriller; Top Gun 3, which McQuarrie is co-writing with Ehren Kruger; and the Les Grossman movie, which McQuarrie has described as a project they riff on at breakfast just to decompress from whatever else they’re shooting. “The conversations we’ve had about Les Grossman are so fucking funny,” McQuarrie told Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. He said they’re having “very serious conversations” about it. Ben Stiller has separately confirmed he and Cruise have talked. I believe all of them.
Broadsword was supposed to start filming in July 2025 with Cavill and Cotillard attached. The plan was for Cruise to wrap the Final Reckoning press tour and head straight into a WWII epic with his favorite director before pivoting to Top Gun 3. That hasn’t happened. As of March 2026, McQuarrie has signed on to write and direct King Conan for 20th Century Studios, a legacy sequel with a 78-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger playing an aged barbarian king who gets deposed and has to fight his way back to the throne. “They just hired a fantastic writer-director who did Tom Cruise’s last four movies,” Schwarzenegger announced at his own Arnold Sports Festival. McQuarrie’s slate already included Broadsword, The Gauntlet, Top Gun 3 (as writer), and the Les Grossman project. Something has to give. Either Broadsword is quietly being delayed while McQuarrie juggles his expanding slate, or the project has cooled and nobody’s saying so publicly. The Cruise-McQuarrie partnership isn’t over, but for the first time since 2012, McQuarrie is directing someone else. That’s worth noticing. Regardless, as a Henry Cavill stan, I hope they get around to Broadsword soon. Imagine Mission Impossible: Fallout energy set in WW2.
Digger
Alejandro González Iñárritu hasn’t made an English-language film since The Revenant. He’s a four-time Oscar winner. He’s the guy who made Birdman, which is a movie about the psychic cost of being famous, and Babel, which is a movie about the impossibility of connection, and The Revenant, which is a movie about a man who refuses to die. Now he’s made a movie about the most powerful man in the world who causes a catastrophe and then goes on a mission to prove he’s humanity’s savior.
The tagline calls it “a comedy of catastrophic proportions.”
I don’t know what Digger is. Nobody does. The plot details are thin. What I know is this: the cast includes Jesse Plemons, Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, Sophie Wilde, Emma D’Arcy, John Goodman, and Cruise as a character named Digger Rockwell. The budget is $125 million, which in Cruise terms is modest. It’s a Warner Bros. and Legendary co-production. It shot in the UK for six months. Iñárritu has said, “The range that I discovered working with Tom is unprecedented for me as a director. I was so fucking impressed and happy.” He’s also said it won’t have much action.
That last detail is the one that matters. Tom Cruise, in a movie with almost no action, directed by a guy who makes actors crawl through frozen rivers and deliver ten-minute monologues about mortality. This is Cruise doing something he arguably hasn’t done seriously since Eyes Wide Shut in 1999: submitting to an auteur’s vision. Kubrick kept him on set for 400 days. Cruise spent that shoot wandering New York as Bill Harford, a man whose certainties dissolve in a single night. He was great in it. People forget that because they remember the publicity cycle with Nicole Kidman, or they remember the Scientology of it all, or they just remember that Kubrick died and the conversation became about everything except the performance. But the Tom Cruise of Magnolia, Vanilla Sky and Eyes Wide Shut is an actor through and through.
There’s a pattern here. In 1999, Cruise was at the absolute peak of his stardom. He’d just done Mission: Impossible and Jerry Maguire back to back. He could have done anything. He chose to spend 400 days on a Kubrick set being directed into submission. In 2024, he was at the peak of his action-star phase, coming off Maverick’s $1.4 billion run and the Final Reckoning press tour. Theoretically he could have jumped straight into Top Gun 3 or Broadsword, despite the last Mission: Impossible movies struggling struggling. But he chose to spend six months on an Iñárritu set doing the same thing. Maybe Cruise uses these collaborations to reset.
Digger could be the role that reminds people who he is as an actor. Iñárritu is the kind of director who peels actors open. He got elite performances out of Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Keaton, and Brad Pitt. This could be the beginning of an elite late-career arc.
Test screening reactions have reportedly called Cruise “unrecognizable.” I can’t wait.
Warner Bros, Paramount-Skydance Merger
Everything on Cruise’s slate runs through Warner Bros. That mattered a lot six months ago. The situation has evolved further since.
To understand why, you have to follow the chain of events. Cruise and Paramount had been drifting for years. In 2021, the studio announced Top Gun: Maverick would get a 45-day theatrical window, and Cruise lawyered up. They pressed him to approve a Mission: Impossible TV show for Paramount+. Plus A Days of Thunder streaming series. Cruise said no to all of it. Meanwhile, the budgets on Dead Reckoning were spiraling, and the relationship was fraying from both sides. Cruise and McQuarrie had developed a habit of rewriting on the fly, which is how you get Fallout and also how you get movies that lose a lot of money like the last 2. Paramount complained he wouldn’t send script pages, wouldn’t share dailies, wouldn’t collaborate the way studios expect. Cruise, for his part, could see what Paramount was becoming. A company in search of a buyer (this was before the Skydance merger). He wasn’t going to let his next decade ride on someone else’s merger timeline.
So in January 2024, he left. Signed a multi-year deal with Warner Bros. to develop and produce original and franchise films. Set up offices on the Burbank lot. Brought his whole operation over. Digger is WB and Legendary. Broadsword is WB. Deeper, the $275 million underwater thriller with Ana de Armas, was at WB before it stalled. Edge of Tomorrow 2 is WB. Warner Bros. was betting that Tom Cruise’s post-Mission: Impossible career was their franchise. The man himself. Not a character. Not an IP.
And then David Ellison bought everybody.
Skydance finished merging with Paramount in August 2025. Ellison, who had co-financed five Mission: Impossible films and Top Gun: Maverick, was now running the studio Cruise had just left. Within months, he was pursuing Warner Bros. Discovery. Netflix made a play. Ellison outbid them. On February 27, 2026, Paramount Skydance announced the acquisition of WBD for roughly $110 billion. The deal is expected to close in Q3 2026, right around the time Digger hits theaters.
Cruise left Paramount because the studio was sinking. Now, ironically, the guy who ran his franchises at Skydance owns Paramount and is about to own Warner Bros. too. Cruise’s old home and his new home are merging into one company, and the person running that company is someone he’s worked with for over a decade. A few weeks ago, Cruise was spotted on the Paramount lot shooting a secret promo video with Jon M. Chu, celebrating the merger and what executives are internally calling a “brand new day.” The combined entity would control Mission: Impossible, Top Gun, DC Comics, Harry Potter, Comedy Central, Game of Thrones, and HBO. It would rival Disney for IP firepower and Netflix for reach. And Tom Cruise, the guy who walked out of Paramount eighteen months ago, would be one of the creators at the center of it.
This changes the calculus on everything. The DC villain idea isn’t fan speculation anymore. Cruise is in the building where DC lives, and the man writing the checks has built his career on Cruise vehicles. Edge of Tomorrow 2 doesn’t need to compete for WB’s attention against other priorities; it’s now a legacy asset for a combined company that needs theatrical events. Even the Les Grossman movie, a comedy about a deranged studio executive, takes on a different flavor when the studio landscape is being redrawn in this fashion. Keep all of this in mind.
Tom Cruise’s Upcoming Slate
Then there’s the question of what happens after Digger. Cruise’s slate right now reads like a man trying to do everything at once, which is how he’s always operated, except now the clock is more visible. The full list is staggering: Digger with Iñárritu this October. Broadsword and The Gauntlet with McQuarrie whenever McQuarrie’s schedule allows. Top Gun 3 in development. Days of Thunder 2 in early development. Edge of Tomorrow 2, fast-tracked to fill the gap left by Deeper, the $275 million underwater thriller with Ana de Armas that Warner Bros. paused over budget concerns and that collapsed further when Cruise and de Armas broke up in October 2025. And then the projects that exist more as ideas than plans: a Les Grossman movie, a potential DC role, and a film that was supposed to be shot in actual outer space.
Top Gun 3 is stalled by logistics, and the reason is the most interesting thing on this list. Joseph Kosinski, who directed Maverick, is committed to a Miami Vice reboot releasing in August 2027. Michael B. Jordan as Tubbs, Austin Butler as Crockett, set in 1985, shooting this summer in Miami for IMAX. Michael Mann is producing (yes, the same Mann who’s doing Heat 2 with Butler, and the same Heat 2 that was too expensive for Warner Brothers and got bought my Amazon MGM) which means we really might get two of the greatest crime action thrillers ever in the next few years.
And here’s where it gets interesting: World of Reel reported recently that Cruise is being eyed to play the villain. The director is Kosinski, who made Maverick with him. The producer is Mann, who directed Cruise in Collateral, the last time he played an antagonist, twenty-two years ago. Cruise’s schedule is wide open until Digger promotion starts in September. The role would put him opposite Jordan, one of the hottest actors in the industry after his Best Actor win for Sinners, and Butler, who’s quietly building one of the most interesting careers of his generation. Cruise as a mid-80s Miami drug lord, with Mann producing and Kosinski shooting it for IMAX, would be the kind of event casting that makes people buy tickets on the title alone. It would also be his first villain since Vincent in Collateral, which remains the most chilling thing he’s ever done. That silver hair. Those dead eyes. The way he moved through the LA night like a man who’d already decided everyone around him was expendable.
All of this means Top Gun 3 probably doesn’t shoot until 2027 at the earliest, putting it in theaters around 2028 or 2029. Cruise will be 66, possibly 67 by then. McQuarrie and Kruger have cracked the story. Maverick will face an existential crisis. Glen Powell and Miles Teller are both attached to return. This will print money whenever it arrives, but the longer it takes, the harder it becomes to justify putting a man approaching 70 in a fighter jet cockpit. Cruise will do it anyway. That’s the point of him.
Days of Thunder 2 is the wildest card in the deck. Jerry Bruckheimer confirmed it. Jeff Gordon confirmed it. Cruise himself told Gordon at the Final Reckoning premiere, “We’re doing it. We’re doing Days of Thunder 2.” The original was a fine movie from 1990, notable primarily for being where Cruise met Nicole Kidman and for being called “Top Gun on wheels” for the rest of eternity. The sequel’s existence is clearly motivated by the success of Brad Pitt’s F1, which cleared $57 million on opening weekend and proved there’s a massive appetite for racing movies with aging stars. Here’s where it gets interesting. Bruckheimer produced both F1 and the original Days of Thunder. Kosinski directed both Top Gun: Maverick and F1. The pieces are all sitting on the same table. Imagine, for a second, that they don’t just make Days of Thunder 2 as a standalone NASCAR movie. Imagine they cross it over with the F1 universe. Cole Trickle and Sonny Hayes. Cruise and Pitt. Bruckheimer sitting in the producer’s chair grinning while two of the biggest movie stars of their generation try to outrace each other on screen. Would it be ridiculous? Yes. I’d buy a ticket day one. The racing movie industrial complex is real now, and this would capitalize on it. While this idea might be too far-fledged, Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise in the same movie would make a billion dollars.
The Les Grossman movie remains exciting. Grossman worked in Tropic Thunder because he was a chaotic interjection, a grotesque cameo that stole every scene he was in. Stretching that into a feature requires a story, and the story has to justify a 63-year-old man in a fat suit and prosthetic hands screaming at people for 90 minutes. McQuarrie says they riff on it constantly. Stiller says maybe something in that world but not necessarily a Tropic Thunder sequel. Justin Theroux says the project isn’t dead but has no movement. The smart bet is that Grossman appears somewhere, maybe in one of the other McQuarrie projects as a cameo or a meta-gag, rather than carrying his own film. But if they find the right angle, if they make Grossman a lens for satirizing today’s Hollywood, with its streaming mergers and AI anxiety and franchise exhaustion, there’s a version of this that’s the funniest thing Cruise has ever done.
Then there’s Edge of Tomorrow 2. The original is a masterpiece of action filmmaking that nobody saw in theaters and everybody discovered on streaming. It’s iconic. A sequel has been in development purgatory for a decade. McQuarrie once said Cruise had a concept that was “locked and loaded.” A script has reportedly been worked on. With Deeper stalled, Production Weekly reported in late 2025 that filming is now slated for late 2026, fast-tracked by Warner Bros. as part of Cruise’s multi-year deal. The working title is Live Die Repeat and Repeat, which is perfect. If they get Blunt back, if the script honors what made the first one special while delivering novelty, this could be the best movie on Cruise’s entire slate.
And then there was, for a while, the space movie. Tom Cruise and Doug Liman had been developing a project with NASA and SpaceX that would have made Cruise the first civilian to perform a spacewalk on camera for a feature film. McQuarrie was writing. Elon Musk described it as “Mission: Impossible in space.” Cruise told Variety in 2023 that he was working on it “diligently.” Nobody talks about it anymore. It represents the logical endpoint of the Cruise stunt philosophy: go higher, go faster, go further, until you literally leave the atmosphere. The fact that even Tom Cruise couldn’t will it into existence says something about where that philosophy hits its ceiling. You can jump out of planes. You can hang off buildings. You can burn a parachute at 10,000 feet and open your backup with 2,000 left. But you can’t make NASA and SpaceX align their schedules with a movie production, and you can’t insure it.
Ultimately, I can’t help but feel Tom Cruise is poised to have the most interesting arc of his career.
Cruise broke his ankle on the Fallout set in 2018, kept shooting, and turned the limp into a character beat. He did the burning parachute jump sixteen times for Final Reckoning. He’s been hit by cars, thrown from motorcycles, held his breath for six minutes underwater, clung to the outside of a plane during takeoff. Val Kilmer, his Iceman, died at 65. Cruise is 63. The clock is real. But instead of slowing him down, it seems to be clarifying his choices.
Think about what could actually be in front of him. A villain turn in Miami Vice that would reunite him with the producer of Collateral and the director of Maverick. A DC role as a sociopathic villain. A potential Days of Thunder sequel or F1 crossover that would put him and Brad Pitt on screen together for the first time in thirty years. Top Gun 3, where a 67-year-old man will climb into a fighter jet and dare you to say he's too old. And Digger, where he apparently becomes a different person entirely. That's what's on the cards. My bucket list goes further: more Michael Mann movies like Collateral, more villain roles like Collateral, a new timeless action franchise like Mission: Impossible, and at minimum one Denis Villeneuve and one Christopher Nolan collaboration each. I've written about the Nolan one before.
Now imagine what happens when the guy who made Fallout, who did the HALO jump and the helicopter chase and the bathroom fight, brings that same intensity to movies with better scripts. Cruise with Iñárritu writing and directing is a different animal than Cruise with a $400 million budget and an AI villain that never quite works. Give him a great writer and a great director who pre-plan the shoot and a character worth caring about, and the results could make everything before it look like a warm-up. He’s done Jerry Maguire. He’s done Eyes Wide Shut. He’s done Magnolia. He knows how to do this. He just hasn’t been asked to in a long time.
And the action isn’t going away. That’s what makes this window so wild. He’s not choosing between being an actor and being an action star. He can do both at once, for the first time since the late ‘90s, except now he has thirty more years of stunt work in his body and a franchise playbook nobody else in the industry can touch. Mission Impossible: Fallout with better writing is the next step. Collateral on a bigger stage is inevitable. Top Gun: Maverick was one of the best movies of his career, and you bet he’s been working to push boundaries even further. He’s only begun tapping into his collaboration potential with Joseph Kosinski, and created 2 of the most visually stunning movies ever (Oblivion being the other).
Tom Cruise hasn’t hit his ceiling yet. He’s been circling it for years, and the projects lining up right now are the ones that could finally get him there.
I can’t wait to see what he does next. I don’t say that about many people.