It’s not been the best couple of months for Tom Cruise. For the first time since 2017’sAmerican Made, Cruise was headlining a non-franchise movie, with his involvement seemingly certain to help make the satirical black comedy Digger a hit. Alas, some scathing initial reviews from critics left Alejandro G. Iñárritu‘s first English-language film since his 2015 hit The Revenant struggling for box office relevance. Against a reported $125 million budget, this bold swing-and-a-miss returned less than $50 million worldwide.
Cruise’s name is often associated with the biggest box office hits of any year. Case in point, his 2022 legacy sequel Top Gun: Maverick proved so popular in theaters that it is often cited as the film that saved cinema following the COVID-19 pandemic. Against a reported budget of $177 million, the movie returned an eye-watering $1.45 billion worldwide, becoming one of the highest-grossing films of all time. The movie was penned by Christopher McQuarrie, who directed Cruise in Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning last year, and was directed by F1‘s Joseph Kosinski.
This combination of powerhouse blockbuster names, plus the on-screen involvement of Miles Teller, Monica Barbaro, andGlen Powell, helped make Top Gun: Maverick unstoppable at the box office. Four years later, the film is still just as popular. At the time of writing, Top Gun: Maverick is one of the ten most-watched movies on Paramount+ in the world. In fact, it ranks as the fourth-most-watched on the streamer, behind only Diablo, Passenger, and the latest installment in the Scary Movie franchise.
Collider Exclusive · Action Franchise Quiz What Action Series Would You Thrive In? Wick · Fast · Mission · Die Hard
Four franchises. Four completely different ideas of what a hero is: the assassin with a code, the family that never leaves anyone behind, the man who does his own stunts, and the guy who simply refuses to die. Only one of them runs on your particular brand of trouble. Eight questions will tell you which one you would survive.
🐕Wick
🏁Fast
🧨Mission
🎄Die Hard
01
How does a room know you’ve walked into it? Every action hero arrives differently. Some of them arrive before they arrive.
02
It turns physical. What does your fighting actually look like? Choreography is character. Yours says something about you.
03
Who is standing beside you when it starts? Some franchises are built on a team. Others are built on one person walking in alone.
04
It has gone badly wrong. What keeps you upright? Act two exists to find out what you’re actually made of.
05
There’s a vehicle. What are you driving, and how? No action franchise has ever survived without a car chase. This one is yours.
06
How do you feel about the people giving the orders? There is always an institution. There is rarely a good one.
07
Underneath all of it, what are you actually doing this for? The stunts are the reason people come. This is the reason they stay.
08
When the credits roll, what do people say about you? Every franchise is really an argument about what makes someone worth watching.
Casting Has Been Completed Your Franchise Is…
Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you
handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive
the trilogy, and probably headline it.
John Wick · Chapters 1–4 · 2014–2023
John Wick
You are precision with a grudge. You don’t posture, you don’t
escalate, and you don’t warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are
so careful never to be the reason you start.
The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who
honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one
against him.
You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and
then completely immovable past it.
Focus, commitment and sheer will. You’d be the one carrying grief through three sequels
and turning it into technique rather than noise.
People wouldn’t call you dangerous. They’d say your name quietly and let that do the
work.
The Fast and the Furious · Fast X · 2001–2023
Fast & Furious
You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about:
the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and
you’d drive through a building for any one of them.
This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject,
because loyalty scales and plot doesn’t have to.
You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you
defend it past the point of reason.
You’d thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve,
an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.
Mission: Impossible · The Final Reckoning · 1996–2025
Mission: Impossible
You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself
anyway. It looks like control, but it’s really responsibility. You have never worked out how
to ask somebody else to carry the risk.
This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the
rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that’s left.
You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an
administrative error.
You’d thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure.
The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.
Die Hard · A Good Day to Die Hard · 1988–2013
Die Hard
You are not the most trained person in the building, the best
equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the
end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.
Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned,
bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn’t make you noble, it makes you sarcastic,
and then it makes you unstoppable.
You’d thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation,
and you’ve never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
You didn’t want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.
‘Top Gun 3’ Is Happening
It’s early days in the development process, but we do know that athird Top Gun movie has been confirmed. The announcement was made at CinemaCon earlier this year, with Cruise crucially confirmed to be back in the pilot’s seat for Paramount’s threequel, and Teller and Powell heavily rumored to return. Super-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who had an impact on the first two installments, will reportedly work alongside McQuarrie to bring Top Gun 3 to life, although it’s likely not going to be for a while until we get a concrete update on proceedings.
Top Gun: Maverick is one of the ten most-watched movies on Paramount+ in the world. Make sure to stay tuned to Collider for the latest streaming stories.
