The combined power of Barbie and Oppenheimer renewed the movie industry with a kind of zeitgeisty excitement for big-screen entertainment that was so palpable it was... a little scary. “Barbenheimer” felt like a once-in-a-generation moment — so how would the movie studios keep delivering? In the wake of WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes that all but halted the momentum, as studio executives waffled over details and their own existential content crisis, the answer, it seems, comes from 2022 instead of 2023: Tom Cruise.

After flirting with franchise work with Universal’s Dark Universe and doing an OK job with the Jack Reacher series (though he has now been out-beefed by Alan Ritchson’s version on Prime Video), Cruise finally found his footing in modern franchise-hungry Hollywood just before the COVID-19 pandemic cratered movies in 2020. Mission: Impossible – Fallout helped Cruise’s 20-year spy franchise hit a new high in 2018, and when his long-desired revival Top Gun: Maverick finally hit theaters, the sequel, as Steven Spielberg would later exalt, saved movies. While Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One did not reach the same heights in 2023, it still cemented Cruise as a bona fide movie star in a sea of superhero wannabes. And as the Marvel mojo fades, Cruise — who famously........

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